Clip art is vector artwork that comes with PowerPoint or that is available from other sources, such as through the Internet. Clip-art graphics are typically in Windows Metafile (WMF) or Enhanced Metafile (EMF) format. Since the clips are vector rather than raster, they can be resized freely without any degradation in image quality.
There are thousands of common images in PowerPoint's clip-art collection that you can use royalty-free in your work, without having to draw your own. For example, suppose you are creating a presentation about physician training. Rather than hiring an artist to draw a picture of a person in a white lab coat, you can use one of PowerPoint's stock drawings of medical professionals, like the ones in Figure 9-1, and save yourself a bundle.
Figure 9-1: Some examples of clip art available in PowerPoint.
The Clip Organizer is a utility program that helps you manage the large quantity of clip art that's available to you as a PowerPoint user. It also allows you to import your own clips, so you can use the Clip Organizer to organize your entire collection of photographs, clip art, sound clips, and video clips in one handy place. There are many techniques for managing artwork libraries that don't have anything to do with PowerPoint, and if you have a system already in place-great. But if not, give the Clip Organizer a try, as described in this chapter, and see if it doesn't meet your needs. Figure 9-2 shows the Clip Organizer window. You'll learn a lot more about it as this chapter progresses.
Figure 9-2: The Clip Organizer window.
There are several different "faces" to the Clip Organizer. One is the window you see in next section. The Clip Organizer can also be accessed through some special-purpose dialog boxes that appear at various times in PowerPoint, such as when choosing a graphical character for a bullet or when inserting clip art using a slide placeholder (as shown in Figure 9-3).
Figure 9-3: Dialog boxes like this one access the Clip Organizer.