Organize media clips in Office XP

Microsoft Office XP includes Microsoft Clip Organizer, a stand-alone program which makes it easier than ever for you to organize and use drawings, photographs, sounds, videos, and other media clips with presentations, publications, and other Office documents. Clip Organizer also comes with a variety of stock media clips for you to use and offers more selection on the Web as well.

How Clip Organizer works

The first time you open Clip Organizer, you can choose to let it scan your computer for photos and other media files and then organize the files it finds into separate folders, called collections, so that you can easily find them later. Clip Organizer doesn't actually copy or move the files on your computer. Instead, the program leaves the files in their original location and simply creates shortcuts for the files in the collection folders. These shortcuts let you preview, open, or insert a media file without having to go to its installed location. Add clips to Clip Organizer yourself or choose to let the program scan for new clips constantly, so that any time you add a media clip anywhere on your computer, it is automatically included in Clip Organizer and ready for you to use when you want it.

The following animated art shows how Clip Organizer will scan for clips the first time you open the program.

Play Demo

Clips available to you in Clip Organizer are classified into four types of collections:

• My Collections, which include clips you have added, either automatically or on your own (for instance, using a camera or scanner).
• Office Collections, which always appear in the collection list and include the clips on the Clip Organizer CD-ROM and clips that are included with Office XP.
• Web collections, which include free clips and may also include content available for purchase on the Web from Microsoft or Microsoft partners.
• Shared Collections, which typically exist on a file server or common workstation and might include clips often used by your workgroup. These types of collections only exist if your network administrator has created and exported a collection for use on a shared network device. You cannot add to or change clips in Shared Collections yourself, like you can for clips added to the My Collections folder.

For detailed information about how to add and organize your clips within these collections, see Microsoft Clip Organizer Help, available in the Microsoft Clip Organizer window.

How to find your clips

You can find the clips you have stored either in Clip Organizer itself or through the Insert Clip Art task pane in many Office programs. In Microsoft Windows, on the Start menu, point to All Programs, point to Microsoft Office, point to Microsoft Office Tools, and then click Microsoft Clip Organizer. Once you're in Clip Organizer, you can search for clips or browse the collections, as shown in the animated example below.

Play Demo

The Search pane in Clip Organizer (on the Standard toolbar, click Search) helps you find clips by letting you type in search keywords or phrases in normal, everyday language — for example, "buildings" or "people at work." If you want to narrow your search, you can specify the clip collections you want to search or ignore, or choose to search only for certain types of media files.

You can also search from within an Office program such as Microsoft PowerPoint® or Microsoft Word. On the Insert menu, point to Picture, and then click Clip Art. Using the Insert Clip Art task pane, you can find and insert the media clips you want to use in Office files without ever leaving the program you're in. The following animated illustration shows how to find your clips using this task pane.

Play Demo

For detailed information about using the Insert Clip Art task pane to find and insert clips, see Microsoft Help for the Office program you are using.

As soon as you start a search in Clip Organizer or the Insert Clip Art task pane, a gallery of thumbnails or icons for drawings, photos, sounds, and other media files appears in the pane. If a clip isn't installed on your computer, you'll see an icon in the lower-left corner of the thumbnail that tells you where the clip is located. The table below shows the icons and what they represent.

If a clip is an animated gif, you'll see a star icon in the lower-right corner of the thumbnail: .