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Clip Art Search Methods
When searching for clips, you should be able to enter a single keyword, click Go, and get the clip you want, right? Well, in theory, it works that way, but not always in practice. Here are some tips for narrowing down your search enough that you don't get hundreds of duds, but not so much that you miss some good images.
Specify Which Collections to Search
Open the Search In list in the Clip Art task pane and mark or clear checkboxes to specify which collections you want to search. The default is All Collections, which searches everywhere.The three main collections are as follows:
My Collections: All the folders that the Clip Organizer is aware of on your local hard disks that contain usable graphics. When you used the Clip Art feature for the first time, it asked permission to catalog your clips; this is why.
Office Collections: All the folders containing clips provided by Microsoft Office that are on your local hard disks.
Web Collections: Pointers to all the locations on the Internet from which Office can pull Microsoft-sponsored clip art.
Eliminating some of the collections from the search can make the search results appear faster. For example, if you are not connected to the Web all the time, but the Web Collections are marked for searching, there will be a delay of up to a minute or two while PowerPoint unsuccessfully tries to locate those clip libraries. By eliminating them from the search process, you make the clips that you have available on your local PC appear faster.Each of the main clip collections has a plus sign and a checkbox next to it. Click the checkbox to select or deselect an entire collection, or click the plus sign to expand the list of folders and then mark or clear the checkbox for individual folders as desired (see Figure 9-7).
Figure 9-7: Narrow down the search to only certain collections, if desired.
Specify Which Media File Types to Find
The default is to search for all media file types: vector graphics (clip art), raster graphics (such as photos), sounds, and videos. If you are sure you want only a certain type of file, you can eliminate the others to make the search go more quickly. For example, if you are searching for clip art, you probably don't want sound files!To narrow down the list of file types, open the Results Should Be drop-down list and clear the checkboxes for one or more of the types.Within each file type you can click the plus sign to further narrow down the types you want, by file extension. For example, you might exclude the PCX and TIF files from the Photographs category but keep the JPEG and GIF files in the search (see Figure 9-8).
Figure 9-8: Narrow down the search to only certain types of files.
Use Multiple Keywords
When you enter multiple keywords, such as green tree, PowerPoint displays only the clips that have all the search words in as keywords. This helps narrow down the search results considerably, but may result in too few clips being displayed.
Use Wildcards
As with searches in Windows itself and in other applications, you can use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard. The asterisk * stands for any number of characters. So, for example, aa* would find clips with keywords including aardvark and Aaron.
Find Clips by Similar Style
Among the Microsoft-provided clips are sets of artwork that are all created in the same style. Sometimes you might want to design a presentation around one of these sets, but how can you find all the images in a set, given that they probably have very different keywords?
The solution is to search by similar style. Right-click a clip in the Clip Art task pane and choose Find Similar Style (if available; it's not available for every clip). The search results display the other clips in that style (see Figure 9-9).
Figure 9-9: Find clips with a similar style to the selected one.
Find Clips by Browsing
Rather than searching by keyword, you can browse the available clip art by category. This requires the use of the Clip Organizer. Here's how to get started:
From the Clip Art task pane, click the Organize Clips hyperlink.
Click the plus sign next to a category in the folder tree to expand it, or click a minus sign to collapse a category.
Click the category you want to see, and its clips appear in the right pane (see Figure 9-10).
Once you've found the clip you want, copy it (Ctrl+C or right-click it and choose Copy).
Close or minimize the Clip Organizer window and paste it on your slide (Ctrl+V or Edit⇨Paste).
Figure 9-10: Browse the Clip Organizer to find a piece of clip art.
Notice that the Clip Organizer does not have a direct way of selecting a clip and inserting it on a slide. That's because the Clip Organizer is a separate application; it is not directly tied to the current presentation the way the Clip Art task pane is. You can copy and paste from it, but you can't simply click a clip to insert it the way you can with the task pane.
Browsing Clip Art Online
The complete collection of Microsoft clip art is available through PowerPoint automatically if you are connected to the Internet when you search for clips. Therefore, there is usually no reason to go to the Microsoft Office Online Web site to search for clip art.However, if you want to browse using an attractive Web-based interface for available clips, you might check out Office Online. To do so, use any of these methods:
From the Clip Art task pane, click the Clip Art on Office Online hyperlink at the bottom.
From the Clip Organizer, click the Clips Online button on its toolbar.
From the Clip Organizer, click the Search button and then click the Clip Art on Office Online hyperlink at the bottom of the search pane.
The Office Online Web site is constantly being changed and updated, so any steps I might provide for you here would likely be out of date before you read this. So, instead I'll just say explore on your own. Figure 9-11 shows it on the day I visited; as you can see it is fairly self-explanatory. You select clips you want to add to a "basket," and then you download the contents of your basket to your hard disk.
Figure 9-11: Browse clips at Microsoft's Web site through the Office Online interface.
| Note | The first time you download clips, you may be prompted to install an Office Template and Media Control utility. Follow the prompts to do so. Then, on subsequent times a page will display showing that it has already been done and prompting you to continue. |
The file downloaded will be a Media Package File (MPF). You must open it to allow the clips to be extracted. Therefore, if you are prompted to save or open the file it is best to choose Open. This extracts the clips to the My Documents\Microsoft Clip Organizer folder, and then shows the clip in the Clip Organizer window in the Downloaded Clips category in the My Collections collection.
| XREF | See Managing the Clips in the Clip Organizer later in the chapter for more information about working with clip collections. |
Making a Clip Available Offline
In the preceding section you learned how to select and transfer Microsoft clip art from the Web to your own local PC. That method works for browsing the Web site, but what if you want to copy a clip to your hard disk that you located through the Clip Art task pane's search?Easy enough-right-click the clip and choose Copy to Collection. Then, specify where you want it copied. To make it available when you are not connected to the Internet, save it in one of your My Collections folders.
Working with CIL or MPF Files
Occasionally you may encounter a file that claims to be clip art but it has a CIL or MPF extension. Both of these are clip art "package" formats that Microsoft has used to bundle and transfer clip art at one time or another. CIL is the older format, and MPF is the newer one.When faced with one of these files, you can choose to run it rather than save it, or you can download it and then double-click it to extract the clip art from it.
