Clip art! Really annoying!

[h792]

Sorry if this has been posted before...

All our computers are a bit of a mess when it comes to bloody clip art. For some reason they either:

1. Don't have any so when you go onto "insert" "clip art" in word, for example nothing much will be there or, even more annoying there will be the thumbnails but not the actual picture and sometimes it says we need to put the office cd in.

Now I don't know which office cd matches which computer and perhaps some of the cd's are lost so trying to use that is out of the question

What I want is this:

Clip art that somehow embeds itself into microsoft applications so the children can just look for clipart in the usual way. I definitely do NOT want an annoying clip art program where you have to load the cd in every time.

I want to get rid of the old clip art that in some cases are merely previews and are just annoying.

I want to find, as cheaply as possible a good clipart/photo program so children can have access to clip art through powerpoint and word

I've just spent a tenner on some focus clip art and it was crap, requiring cd's to be put in to use it and you also have to use it's viewer.

Any ideas? I wish there was something free I could just download?!!!

Thanks for your help!!!!!


Howard.

[NetworkGeezer]

Do you have the Office XP install discs.

Disc2 has the clipart. This is what you need if your using Office XP or Office 2003. Do full install to disk.

[NetworkGeezer]

Hmm I have assumed you were talking about Microsoft Office but is that what you meant?

[CyberNerd]

Best clipart I've seen is openclipart http://www.openclipart.org/

The files are Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and work perfectly fine on standards compliant software (openoffice) but will most likely be more tricky in MS office (this is a guess as I don't have ms office handy).
Probably you could script imagemagick to convert the files to a MS freindly file format. Then just dump the files wherever the office application looks by default.

[h792]

Hi,

I could probably find a few office xp disks but not the ones that match. Does that matter? Do I have to reinstall office entirely?

I have just downloaded open office. Will this solution work on the old win 98 machines too? How do I convert the images?

[CyberNerd]

I have just downloaded open office. Will this solution work on the old win 98 machines too? How do I convert the images?

Openoffice will work on 98/ME/2k/XP and you won't need to convert the images as OOo will natively import SVG

[NetworkGeezer]

@CyberNerd

Can OpenOffice import Windows MetaFiles as I think that's what Microsoft use to distribute their clipart, the vector stuff anyway.

[h792]

Can't believe how helpful people are here!

Right, trying it out on my computer...

Extracted all the files but it's really confusing, i can see "transport" "animals" etc etc etc but the image is a tiny (looking) "png" image and next to it is a text document and svg file. How do I get it into the usual word location of "insert" "clipart"?

They're tiny too!

[CyberNerd]

Indeed. OpenOffice will also import the following picture file formats:
BMP,DXF,EMF,EPS,GIF,JPEG,MET,PBM,PCD,PCT,PCX,PGM,P NG,PPM,PSD,RAS,SGF,SGV,SVM,TGA,TIFF,WMF,XBM

[h792]

Ahh, I've sort of managed it but the pictures are really small and low res. Any ideas?

[CyberNerd]

Extracted all the files but it's really confusing, i can see "transport" "animals" etc etc etc but the image is a tiny (looking) "png" image and next to it is a text document and svg file. How do I get it into the usual word location of "insert" "clipart"?

ok, I think the little png files are the 'thumbnails' but the SVG's are the images. If word won't import them then you'll either need to convert them to another format (imagemagick would be the tool of choice for this -but I'll probably get stuck if you ask me exactly how to script it) or try importing them into OOo.

[h792]

Bugger, it's got a cannabis leaf in it!

[CyberNerd]

lol, I think its tomato leaf

[h792]

I can't convert all the fles in one go, just each one indivdiually.

Any other ideas for clipart?

[CyberNerd]

I searched for a way of converting en mass and found this link.

http://studio.imagemagick.org/discus...c.php?p=19929&

Maybe the windows scripting Gurus can help with this one.