Managing Clips in the Clip Organizer
There are probably images elsewhere on your PC that you would like to use in PowerPoint besides the Microsoft Office 2003 clip collection. For example, perhaps you have some scanned photos or some clip art you have downloaded from a Web site that offered free clips, or some clip art left over from an earlier version of Office.
If you need to use this "outside" art only once or twice, you can simply insert it with the Insert⇨Picture⇨From File command, covered in Chapter 8. But if you have a recurring need for the art, you might want to add it to the Clip Organizer.
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Remember, to open the Clip Organizer, click the Organize Clips hyperlink at the bottom of the Clip Art task pane.
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You can include images of all image formats in the Clip Organizer, not just the default .wmf format that PowerPoint's clip art uses. The image formats that PowerPoint supports include .emd, .wmf, .jpg, .png, .bmp, .pcx, .dib, .rle, .eps, .dxf, .pct, .cgm, .cdr, .drw, .tif, .tga, .pcd, .gif, .wpg, .fpx, and .mix. The Clip Organizer also accepts many sound and video formats as well. The Clip Organizer is not only for clip art, but also for scanned and digital camera photos, video clips, and sound clips.
Cataloging Clips From Other Sources
The first time you use clip art, PowerPoint offers to catalog the clips on your system. If you let it, you end up with a fairly complete "My Collections" group of folders in the Clip Organizer, containing every piece of usable artwork PowerPoint could find.
If you did not go through the cataloging process, or if you've added files to your hard disk after going through that process, you can recatalog your system at any time. You can also manually add an individual clip at any time.
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Any clips you add are placed in the My Collections collection. You cannot add clips to the Office Collections or Web Collections categories. This is true whether you add them automatically or manually.
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ADDING CLIPS AUTOMATICALLY TO THE CLIP ORGANIZER
These steps repeat the process of cataloging the clips on your hard disk. It is not necessary to do this unless the content of your hard disk has changed since you originally cataloged it.
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From the Clip Organizer, choose File⇨Add Clips to Organizer⇨Automati-cally.
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(Optional) In the dialog box that appears, click the Options button to open the Auto Import Settings dialog box. You can then mark or clear checkboxes for various locations that you want to include in the automatic cataloging (see Figure 9-15). This might be useful for saving time if you know that the clips you want to catalog are all in a certain folder, for example.
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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.
ADDING CLIPS MANUALLY TO THE CLIP ORGANIZER
Not all clips are picked up automatically during the cataloging process, so you might want to manually add some clips. For example, the automatic cataloging process looks for clips only on your local hard disk(s), and you might want to catalog the clips on a shared network drive at your place of business.
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Earlier versions of Office stored local collections of clip art in a different place. Office XP, for example, stored it in Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Clipart\Cagcat50, and Publisher XP used Program Files\Microsoft Office\CLIPART\PUB60COR. The clip art in these old locations does not appear in the collections in Office 2003 applications by default. Neither is it picked up by the automatic cataloging process. The only way to get it into the Clip Organizer is by manually cataloging it, as described here.
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To manually add one or more clips, do the following:
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From the Clip Organizer window, choose File⇨Add Clips to Organizer⇨On My Own. The Add Clips to Organizer window appears.
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Navigate to the clips you want to add. This can be on a local, network, or Internet location.
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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.
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Click the Add To button. A list of the existing collections in the Clip Organizer appears (see Figure 9-16). (If you do not do this step, the clips are placed in the Unclassified Clips folder, and you can sort them out later.)
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Select the collection in which you want to place the new clips, and click OK.
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To create a new clip collection, click My Collections, and then click New. Type a name for a new collection, and click OK. Then select the new folder on the list, and click OK.
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Click the Add button. The clips are added to the specified collection.
Removing Clips From the Clip Organizer
After the automatic cataloging process (or maybe after the manual one too), you might end up with some subcollections within My Collections that you don't want. The automatic cataloging process sometimes identifies artwork that is not really artwork-that is, little graphics that are part of some other application's operation. To remove these from your Clip Organizer, right-click the graphic and choose Delete. The same goes for entire folders-right-click and choose Delete.
For example, in Figure 9-17, notice that the Clip Organizer has cataloged a clip from the Windows\Help folder. I am right-clicking the Help folder in the folder tree and choosing Delete Help to get rid of it. This does not delete the picture or its folder from the hard disk; it simply removes its reference from the Clip Organizer.
Changing Clip Keywords
After creating an automatic catalog, you will probably end up with lots of clips in the Unclassified Clips collection. Some of these you might want to delete, having no use for them, but others you will want to keep. In order for these clips to show up when you do a search, you must assign keywords to them. You cannot modify the keywords for the clip art that comes with PowerPoint/Office 2003; you can modify them only for art you have imported.
Automatically cataloged clips will have several keywords pre-assigned based on the file name and location. For example, suppose that the clip Blue Hills.jpg has been cataloged from the Documents and Settings\All Users\My Documents\My Pictures\Sample Pictures folder. It will have the following keywords pre-assigned: Blue Hills, Documents and Settings, All Users, Documents, My Pictures, and Sample Pictures. These are not very helpful when trying to locate the clip by subject, however, so you will want to add some content-based keywords too.
To modify a clip's keywords, do the following:
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From the Clip Organizer, right-click the clip (or click the down arrow next to it) and choose Edit Keywords.
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The default caption for the clip is the file name. Change it to a more meaningful caption in the Caption box, if desired. This caption will appear in some views and anywhere that an application pulls a caption automatically.
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To add a keyword for the clip, type the new keyword in the Keyword box and click Add (see Figure 9-18).
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To remove a keyword, select the keyword and click Delete.
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When you are finished, click OK to close the dialog box, or click the Previous or Next button to move to another clip in the same folder.
You can modify multiple clips at once by selecting multiple clips before you right-click (step 1 in the preceding steps). When multiple clips are selected, the All Clips at Once tab becomes available in the Keywords dialog box. From there you can add keywords that will apply to all the selected clips.
Creating New Clip Collections
To add a new clip collection to the My Collections group, do the following:
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Right-click My Collections and choose New Collection.
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In the New Collection dialog box, type a name for the new collection.
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Click OK.
Whatever folder you right-click in step 1 will be the parent folder for the new one, so you can nest folders several levels deep in the organizational structure. For example, you could create a Family folder and then within that have Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and Siblings folders.
Moving and Copying Clips between Collections
A clip can be in multiple collections at once without taking up double the space on the hard disk, so feel free to place a clip in as many different collections as are appropriate for it.
Drag-and-drop a clip onto a folder in the Collection List to copy it to that collection. Copying it to another collection does not remove it from its original location; if you want to move rather than copy, delete the original after copying it or use Move to Collection on the clip's menu in the Clip Organizer.
