Working with Clip Art Collections

The Clip Organizer is a utility that manages the clips from various collections. You can use the Clip Organizer to browse entire clip collections by subject, regardless of keyword. It also manages clips of other types, including bitmap images (such as scanned photos), sounds, and video clips. In the following sections, you learn how to browse, categorize, and organize clips in the Clip Organizer, as well as how to add clips to it.

Opening and Browsing the Clip Organizer

To open the Clip Organizer, click the Organize Clips link at the bottom of the Clip Art pane. The Collection List pane lists the three default groups: My Collections, Office Collections, and Web Collections. Within each of these collections are nested folders, or sub-collections, containing clips. To expand or collapse a folder, double-click it, or click the plus or minus sign to its left, as shown in Figure 12.4.

Figure 12.4: You can browse clip art by collection, as well as by category within a collection.

The My Collections group contains two collections by default:

• Favorites: This is where clips are placed when you make them available offline. (This is covered in the section "Making Clips Available Offline.")

• Unclassified Clips: This is where clips are placed when they are manually added to the Clip Organizer. (This is covered in the section "Working with Clip Keywords and Information.")

You can add more collections to the My Collections group, as well as more clips. It is the only group that you can modify. The Office Collections group contains collections that Microsoft provides and stores on your hard disk. The Web Collections group contains collections that you access through the Internet.

Using the Clip Organizer to Insert Clip Art

As you saw at the beginning of this chapter, when you insert clip art from the Clip Art pane, you cannot browse for it. You can only search based on keywords. If you would rather peruse the available clip art in a more leisurely fashion, you can open the Clip Organizer to do so.

The Clip Organizer is not really designed for easy insertion of clips into a presentation, but it is possible to do this using the Clipboard. To select a clip from the Clip Organizer for insertion in your presentation, do the following:

1. From the Clip Art pane, click Organize Clips. The Clip Organizer window opens.

2. Make sure that Collection List, and not Search, is selected on the toolbar. Click Collection List, if necessary.

3. Click the collection that you want to browse. The Clip Organizer displays the available clips. When you find the clip that you want to insert, right-click it and choose Copy.

4. Close or minimize the Clip Organizer. Display the slide in PowerPoint on which you want to place the clip, and then right-click and choose Paste. Alternatively, you can drag and drop clips from the Clip Organizer window onto a PowerPoint slide.

Creating and Deleting Folders

Each folder in the Clip Organizer represents a collection (or a sub-collection within a collection). The folders that you create are placed in the My Collections group, and you can place clips into a collection or sub-collection by dragging and dropping them into the desired folder. To create a folder in the Clip Organizer, follow these steps:

1. Choose File New Collection. The New Collection dialog box opens, as shown in Figure 12.5.

   
   Figure 12.5: You can create new collection folders.

2. In the Name text box, type a name for the new collection.

3. To create a top-level collection, click My Collections. To create a folder within a collection, click that collection within My Collections.

4. Click OK. The Clip Organizer creates the new folder.

To delete a folder, right-click it and choose Delete foldername, where foldername is the name of the folder.

Moving Clips between Collections

A clip can exist in multiple collections simultaneously; only one copy actually exists on your hard disk, but pointers to it can appear in multiple places. When you drag a clip from one collection to another, you are actually making a copy of its pointer to the new location. The shortcut to the clip is not removed from the original collection. You can delete a clip from a collection by right-clicking it and choosing Delete, or pressing the Delete key.

Cataloging Clips

There are probably images elsewhere on your PC that you would like to use in PowerPoint besides the Microsoft Office clip art collection. For example, perhaps you have some scanned photos or some clip art that you have downloaded from a Web site that offers free clips. If you need to use this downloaded clip art only once or twice, you can simply insert it with the Picture button on the Insert tab. However, if you want to use the clip art more often, you can add it to your Clip Organizer.

You can include images in all image formats in the Clip Organizer, not just the default format that PowerPoint's clip art uses. The image formats that PowerPoint supports are shown in Table 12.1.

Table 12.1: PowerPoint Image Formats
Open table as spreadsheet

BMP	EPS	PCX
CDR	FPX	PNG
CGM	GIF	RLE
DIB	JPG/JPEG/JPE/JFIF	TGA
DRW	MIX	TIF/TIFF
DXF	PCD	WMF
EMF	PCT/PICT	WPG

The Clip Organizer is not only for clip art, but also for scanned and digital camera photos, video clips, and sound clips. It can accept many sound and video formats.

CROSS-REF 

You will work with the clip organizer further in Chapters 16 and 17, which deal with sound and video.

Adding a clip to the Clip Organizer does not physically move the clip; it simply creates a link to it in the Clip Organizer so that the clip is included when you search or browse for clips.

Note 

Any clips that you add are placed in My Collections; you cannot add clips to the Office Collections or Web Collections categories. This is the case whether you add them automatically or manually.

Adding Clips Automatically to the Clip Organizer

The quickest way to catalog the clips on your hard disk is to allow the Clip Organizer to import the clips automatically. To automatically catalog your clips, follow these steps:

1. From the Clip Organizer, choose File Add Clips to Organizer Automatically.

2. (Optional) In the dialog box that appears, click the Options button to open the Auto Import Settings dialog box. You can then select or deselect check boxes for various locations that you want to include in the automatic cataloging, as shown in Figure 12.6. The first time you open this dialog box, the utility scans the hard disk for clips, and you must wait for a minute or so while it does this.

   
   Figure 12.6: You can specify the locations that you want the Clip Organizer to catalog.

3. If you performed step 2, click Catalog to perform the search for clips. If you did not perform step 2, click OK to perform the search.

4. Wait for the Clip Organizer to catalog the clips. This process takes several minutes and includes several steps, including creating the collections, adding the clips, and adding keywords to them.

Adding Clips Manually to the Clip Organizer

Not all clips are picked up automatically during the cataloging process, and so you might need to manually add some clips. For example, the automatic cataloging process only looks for clips on your local hard disks, and you might want to catalog some clips in a network location.

Caution 

Some earlier versions of Office stored the local collection of clip art in a different place. For example, Office XP stored this collection in Program Files\Common Files\ Microsoft Shared\Clipart\Catcat50. By default, the clip art in this old location does not appear in the collections for Office 2003 or 2007 applications. In addition, it is not detected by the automatic cataloging process. The only way to import it into the Clip Organizer is by manually cataloging it, as described here.

To manually add one or more clips, do the following:

1. From the Clip Organizer window, choose File Add Clips to Organizer On My Own. The Add Clips to Organizer window appears.

2. Navigate to the clips that you want to add. They can be in a local, network, or Internet location.

3. Select the clips. To select more than one clip, hold down the Shift key to select a contiguous group or the Ctrl key to select a non-contiguous group.

4. Click the Add To button. A list of the existing collections in the Clip Organizer appears, as shown in Figure 12.7.

   
   Figure 12.7: You can specify the location to which you want to add the clips.

5. Select the collection in which you want to place the new clips, and click OK. If you would rather create a new clip collection, click My Collections and then click New. Type a name for the new collection and click OK. Then select the new folder on the list and click OK.

6. Click the Add button. The Clip Organizer adds the clips to the specified collection.

Working with CIL or MPF Files

Occasionally, you might encounter a file that claims to be clip art but that 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. MPF is the newer format, for Office XP and higher; CIL is the older format, for Office 97 and 2000.

These packages are executable, which means that executing them copies the art to the Clip Organizer. When you find one of these files, you can choose to run it rather than save it to immediately extract its clips, or you can download the file and then double-click it to extract the clip art from it later.

Deleting Clips from the Clip Organizer

After the automatic cataloging process (and possibly after the manual one), you might end up with some clip collections within My Collections that you don't want. The automatic cataloging process sometimes identifies files that are not really useful as clip art-for example, little graphics that are part of some other application's operation.

To remove a graphic-or even an entire folder-from your Clip Organizer, right-click it and choose Delete. Figure 12.8 shows a situation where the Clip Organizer has cataloged the clips from of a folder labeled i386; this folder is actually used for installing Windows. In the example, you can right-click the i386 folder in the folder tree and choose Delete "i386" to get rid of it. This does not delete the pictures or the folder from the hard disk; it simply removes its reference from the Clip Organizer. You can also delete individual clips in the same way.

Figure 12.8: You can remove a clip or a category from the Clip Organizer by right-clicking it and choosing Delete.

Inserting an Image from a Scanner

If you have a scanner or digital camera, you can use it from within the Clip Organizer to scan a picture and store it there. In PowerPoint 2007, this is the only way of accessing the Scanner and Camera Wizard, because that functionality is no longer in the main PowerPoint application. To scan a picture into the Clip Organizer, do the following:

1. Make sure your scanner is ready. Place the picture that you want to scan on the scanner glass.

2. From the Clip Organizer, choose File Add Clips to Organizer From Scanner or Camera.

3. Select the scanner from the Device list.

4. Choose a quality, such as Web quality (low) or Print quality (high).

5. To scan using default settings, click Insert. To adjust the settings further, click Custom Insert, change the settings, and then click Scan.

The scanned clip appears in the My Collections collection, in a folder with the same name as the device (in this case, the scanner's make and model). From there, you can assign keywords to the clip to make it easier to find, as explained in the next section.

EXPERT TIP 

On a Windows Vista system, the scanned file is located in the Pictures\Microsoft Clip Organizer folder on your hard disk, in case you want to use it in some other application that does not support the Clip Organizer. It is assigned a filename that begins with mso (for example, mso414611), and it is saved in JPEG format. Under Windows XP, it is located in My Pictures\Microsoft Clip Organizer.

Caution 

Good-quality scanners can scan at 300 dpi or more, but for use in PowerPoint, an image needs to have a resolution no higher than 96 dpi, the resolution of a monitor. Excessive resolution when scanning is one reason why graphics take up so much space. If you want to use an image in PowerPoint that has already been scanned and has a high resolution, consider opening it in a graphics program and reducing its resolution before importing it into PowerPoint.

Making Clips Available Offline

Most of the clips that appear in the Clip Organizer are not on your local hard disk; they are online. This means that you do not have access to them when you are not connected to the Internet. If you find some clip art in the Clip Organizer that you want to have available offline, you can add the clip to your local hard disk, as follows:

1. In the Clip Organizer or the Clip Art pane, open the menu of the clip that you want (the arrow to its right) and choose Make Available Offline. The Copy to Collection dialog box opens.

   If the Make Available Offline command is not present, it means that this clip is already on your local hard disk.

2. Select the collection in which you want to place the clip. (You can also click New to create a new collection.) Then click OK.

Strategies for Organizing Your Clips

To use the Clip Organizer most effectively, you need to put some thought into how you want to structure your collections. When you select File Add Clips to Organizer Automatically, the Clip Organizer automatically generates collections that are great for initially populating the organizer. However, you will probably want to arrange these files afterwards. There are several ways to organize the My Collections group, and each method has its pros and cons:

• By location: This is how the automatic cataloging sets up your collection. Pros: you can browse all of the clips in a location at once. Cons: the clips are not grouped logically according to content.

• By topic: You can create folders for various subjects, such as agriculture, animals, business, and so on, similar to the Office Collections and Web Collections. Pros: it is easy to find clips for a certain subject. Cons: there is no differentiation between media types.

• By media type: You can create folders for various media types, such as clip art, pictures, sounds, and videos. Pros: you do not have to wade through a lot of clips of the wrong file type to find what you want. For example, you do not have to look through clip art to find sounds, and vice versa. Cons: when creating a presentation, you usually have a topic in mind before a media type.

EXPERT TIP 

Perhaps the best solution if you have a lot of clips is to combine the topic and media-type methods. You can organize first by topic, and then within topic into separate folders by media type, or you can organize first by media type and then by topic within those folders.

To change the organization method of your Clip Organizer window from location-based to topic-or type-based, you can create new folders and then drag clips into the new folders. The Clip Organizer only copies the shortcuts there-it does not move them there-and so they remain in their location-based folders, as well. You can either leave these location-based folders in place for extra flexibility, or you can delete them.

Working with Clip Keywords and Information

After creating an automatic catalog, you will probably end up with a lot of clips in the Unclassified Clips collection. You can delete any you don't want. The remaining ones must be assigned keywords so they will show up when you do a search by keyword in the Clip Art pane.

You can edit the keywords and information only for clips stored on your own hard disk, not for clips stored online. That's because the online collection is shared by all Office users. If you want to re-keyword an online clip, copy it to your hard disk first and then work with that copy.

Automatically cataloged clips have several keywords pre-assigned, based on their filename and location. For example, suppose that the clip Blue Hills.jpg is cataloged from the Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\My Pictures\Sample Pictures folder. (This is where Windows XP stores its sample pictures, and that picture came with Windows XP.) It will have the following keywords pre-assigned: Blue Hills, Documents and Settings, All Users, Documents, My Pictures, and Sample Pictures. However, these keywords are not very helpful when you want to locate the clip by subject, and so you will want to add some content-based keywords, as well.

Changing the Keywords for an Individual Clip

To modify a clip's keywords and information, do the following:

1. From the Clip Organizer, right-click the clip (or click the down arrow to its right) and choose Edit Keywords.

2. The default caption for the clip is the filename. You can change it to a more meaningful caption in the Caption text box. This caption will appear in some views as well as anywhere that an application automatically pulls a caption.

3. To add a keyword for the clip, type the new keywords in the Keyword text box and click Add, as shown in Figure 12.9.

   
   Figure 12.9: You can add or delete keywords for a clip.

4. To remove a keyword, click the keyword on the list and click Delete.

5. When you finish changing the clip's keywords and caption, click OK to close the dialog box, or click the Previous or Next button to move to a different clip in the same folder.

Changing the Keywords for Multiple Clips at Once

You can modify multiple clips at once by selecting multiple clips before you right-click (step 1 in the preceding steps). When you select multiple clips, the All Clips at Once tab becomes available in the Keywords dialog box. From there, you can add keywords that apply to all of the selected clips. For example, in Figure 12.10, you can add the keyword "landscapes" to all of the selected clips.

Figure 12.10: You can add or delete keywords for multiple clips at once on the All Clips at Once tab.

Browsing for More Clips on Office Online

When you browse for clip art while connected to the Internet, the Office Online clip art automatically appears. However, you can also visit the Office Online Web site to browse the clip art directly.

To open a Web browser window for the Office Online clip art gallery, do one of the following:

• From the Clip Art pane, click the Clip art on Office Online link.

• From the Clip Organizer window, click the Clips Online toolbar button.

Either way, the same Web page displays (provided you have Internet access). It contains information about clip art, links to art collections, featured clips, and more. It is constantly changing, but Figure 12.11 shows how it looked on the day I visited.

Figure 12.11: Visit the Office Online clip art Web page for more information and more clip art.

If you have a full-time Internet connection, there is little reason to download clips to your hard disk from the Office Online Web site because your clip art search by keyword will always include this Web site. However, if your Internet connection is not always active, you might want to download the clips you need in advance so that they will be available when you need them.

To copy clips from the Office Online Web site to your hard disk for later use, follow these steps:

1. From the Office Online clip art Web page, scroll down to the Browse Clip Art and Media Categories list and click a category to display it.

2. In the list of clips, select the check boxes for the clips that you want, as shown in Figure 12.12. You may find multiple pages of clips in that category; click the Next arrow to go to the next page.

3. When you finish making selections, click the Download hyperlink at the left. For example, in Figure 12-12, the link is labeled "Download 5 items" because I have chosen five items.

   
   Figure 12.12: You can download clips from Office Online for future use.

4. If this is the first time that you have used the service, a Terms of Use screen appears. Scroll down to the bottom and click Accept to continue.

5. Click Download Now.

6. A dialog box appears, saying that it is downloading the file Clipart.mpf, and asking whether you want to save or open it. Choose Open.

Note 

MPF stands for Media Package File. When downloading one of these files, you should choose to open it rather than save it, because opening it integrates its content automatically with the Clip Organizer. Saving the file stores it somewhere on your hard disk without adding the clips to the Clip Organizer. However, you might need to do this if you download clips that you want to use on another PC; in this case, you can transfer the MPF file to the other PC before double-clicking to open it.

Caution 

When an MPF file unpacks, it uses the Temporary Internet File folder to do so. If this folder is too full (indicating that there is insufficient space remaining on the hard disk), the clips may not import into Clip Organizer.

The selected clips appear in the Clip Organizer, in the Downloaded Clips folder under My Collections. They are now ready for you to use.