Thou Art Clip Art: Microsoft Office Clip Art

By Mayur Polepalli

Ever needed that perfect image? Not able to locate the right clip art for your case study? Can’t source the sound effect to add punch to your presentation?

Look no further!

Microsoft has an excellent gallery of clip art, animations, sounds, and pictures at Microsoft Office Clip Art and Media Home Page. Design Gallery Live now has a new look and is packed with a completely new set of intuitive features and brand new clip art.

The site layout is simple – links on both sides and core content in the middle; pleasing – the colors and the fonts selected are easy on the eye; and usable – content including sound clips can be copied directly to your system. (Again a one of its kind. All you do is click the right mouse button, copy, and paste it on your system.)

The site is packed with powerful and exciting features, the kind other sites aspire to mimic. A good example is the check boxes. When you select a media type, a blue box moves into your selection basket. This gives you the feeling that the image or sound you selected has been placed in the basket. Also, the selection basket details are instantly updated, displaying the size of the images and the approximate download time. Not that this changes the way you browse content, but it is a nice-to-have feature.

Content

The content available in the site is voluminous and varied. All the clips are broadly classified into around 50 categories to make your job easier. There are few searches that don’t return satisfying results. The quality of the available clip art is above average and the most of the files are resizable as they are downloaded in WMF, a format that works best with MS Office. Another commendable feature is that when you select multiple clips for download, all of them are packed into one file. These clips are also added to your own clip art gallery.

The Clip of the Day features a clip that is usually relevant to the day as far as possible. I found an Easter Egg during Easter.

Search capabilities

The Search feature on the site can look for multiple search terms at once. For example, you could type "dog photo" in a search, and the results of your search will be photographs of dogs. However, this does not always work. Simple things like identifying wrongly spelt words and providing alternate spellings (as in Google) is not available but then this site is not a full-fledged search engine. Using the drop-down list box can further narrow down your search results. You can also search by selecting an area from the Browse section in the lower part of the home page.

Clicking an area and then searching for a specific thing can narrow the search down. For example, if you click the Pastel link and then type "car" into the Search box, your results will display pastel images of cars. More often than not, people would search for images rather than browse for them. Therefore, the search engine needs to be improved.

Personalization

The Language settings, an option I have not come across in other sites, allows you to view content in the language of your choice. All you have to do is update the language settings in your browser. I tested it for French and Hindi, and both gave flawless results.

You can also opt to change the number of images displayed in a page and the size of the preview.

Similar sites

There are other sites on the net that offer clip art too. None of them match the quantity, quality or cost of Microsoft Office Clip Art. Clipart Kingdom makes you want to create your own clip art rather than going through their laborious registration process. For what? Some shoddy images. Not worth it. There is also clipart.com that has a decent collection, but at a price. It would cost us close to 500 INR per week to use their services.

The site is an excellent resource for beefing up websites, newsletters, brochures, and any kind of presentation or document you are working with. Microsoft is generous with their permission to use and distribute this content in your presentations.

However, I would recommend serious users read the Terms of Use. The way things have been categorized is commendable and the ability to search is average. The lack of pop ups and advertisements is manna to the eye. The designers have taken great care to ensure that the site is usable and have done an excellent job of it. Overall the site is brilliant, a must-see for all communicators.

Try it.

(Mayur Polepalli is a Technical Writer with Oracle, Bangalore).

The Web Page Artist

By Lavanya Devdas

Developing a web page is a creative art. It is an artist’s canvas to get the viewer immersed into a whirlpool of knowledge. Planning a website can be as daunting a task as putting a jigsaw puzzle in complete order. Getting every miniscule piece in the right groove is the challenge. Content, design, colour, images, bandwidth, and technology are the large blocks of the puzzle. The Web artist will do well to bring these into an order.

If you are a novice and want to allow your artistry to take precedence in creating and designing a fantastic Web page, the The SSI Developer ( http://www.ssi-developer.net/) is a place to visit. This is a site that the web deign fraternity could feast on! And yes, if you are curious about how to assemble and put together a web page, you do not have to step too far.

This site has an overwhelming array of templates, tutorials, recommended development tools, and links to informative sites. The SSI (Server Side Includes) allows you to place special code 'elements' in your documents, to carry out certain actions specified by you. You can place the ‘directives’ or ‘commands’ into your HTML (or other) documents to execute the scripts. This helps you provide interactivity to your website and also helps in fluent site management. For example, content, which is common to all the Web pages can be placed in just a single document to be included in all the other pages. If you need to make changes, you just need to modify the source document! This comes in as a boon, more so for copyright information that appears on every page. Having this content in a single file means that the changes can be done very quickly without having to modify large documents ranging from 10 to 50 pages!

The SSI LAB takes you through a comprehensive introduction to SSI - enabling SSI on your server, creating a website template, creating a printer friendly page, and simple tricks to putting a HTML form and Thank-you page in the same document.

The CSS Templates, offers a range of the basic templates, ideal for a novice at Web designing. If you have a time crunch, all you need to do is download the template, plug in the information and lo! Your web page is all ready in a platter!

The site offers a collection of basic guides on web design related subjects. Topics range from htaccess authorization, and CSS, to XHTML. Enzo, the creator of this website, believes in sharing knowledge and is a modest learner too, constantly adding new guides and updating the existing ones. You can wait for a comprehensive walkover on technologies like XML. You can begin with TUTORIALS to understand what web designing is all about.

If you are looking for references, this site does not disappoint you. Here you find a plethora of references and tutorials. Resources gives you a complete know how on the World Wide Web Consortium, and tutorials and references on HTML, XHTML, CSS, and others.

And lastly, if you are looking for a few tips, there are a few gems that come your way – A Web safe color chart ensures that your web page looks uniform to visitors over the web; a pallet of 216 web safe colors and their corresponding codes are provided.

All you aspiring webmasters, web developers, and curious folks; make the best use of this site, as Enzo was just like one of you, starting out as novice Web developer. The information that is available has been amassed over the years. Allow your esthetics to lay supreme and Web away your creation!

Try it.

(Lavanya Devdas is a Technical Communicator with Infosys, Mangalore).

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