Replacing Microsoft Office Clipart

[Martin Stender]

(Sorry for the crossposting, but I posted to a generic MS Office group
this friday, and just found out that group is very 'low-traffic'). So
once again:

Hi all!

We have made a new clipart collection that matches the MS Office
collection picture for picture. Not the same motives of course, but
they communicate whatever the old ones was meant to communicate.

Why did we do this? Well, not to insult anyone at MS or anything, we
just didn't think they were that hot, and now we would like our users
to use the new ones instead.

But we would really like to keep the existing indexing and keywords for
obvious reasons.

So, any ideas how to go about this?
I obviously tried to just replace all the .wmf files in 'C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Office\media\cagcat10' folder, and while the actual
inserted clipart is the correct new one, the preview thumbnail in the
Clip Organizer is still the old MS one.

So I've tried everything, one of these include renaming the files -
forcing an update of the file. But for some reason, the old thumbnail
manages to sneak back in.
And that really gets me. I deleted the original .wmf's completely, but
nevertheless the jump right back in, when I relaunch Clip Organizer.
Ghost in the machine ...

Anyway, is there some sort of tool or anything that can edit the preset
catalog-files that comes with office 2002?

Other suggestions?

Thanks in advance
Martin

 

[Glen Millar]

Hi,

Depending on version. For example, in 2002 or 2003 click on Organise Clips.
Then you can import new ones into your Clip Art area, as well as edit
keywords you would use to find them.

--

--
Regards,

Glen Millar
Microsoft PPT MVP
www.powerpointworkbench.com

Australia

Please tell us your PowerPoint version,
whether you are using vba,
whether your dog has fleas, or
anything else relevant.

 

[Martin Stender]

Hi Glen

Thanks for the answer, but I guess I wasn't clear.

It is the Microsoft Office Collection we want to tamper with, and that
- according to MS - is a read-only collection.
We don't need to add or delete elements to or from it as such - we just
need to replace the actual clipart with new (better) ones we have.

Obviously we could just create our own collection from scratch, but
some (about half) of our users have grown somewhat accustomed to using
the Office collection, and their habits are a bit hard to break.

But the term 'read-only' doesn't necessarily mean it can't be tampered
with - I just need to find out how...

Best regards
Martin

 

[Glen Millar]

Martin,

Now I get it. And you are right. You can't change it



--
Regards,

Glen Millar
Microsoft PPT MVP
www.powerpointworkbench.com

Australia

Please tell us your PowerPoint version,
whether you are using vba,
whether your dog has fleas, or
anything else relevant.

 

[Echo S]

I think you'd have to import the images into the clip gallery or organizer
and add the keywords manually.

This was one of the complaints for people moving from Office 2000 (clip
gallery) to Office 2002 (clip organizer) -- there was no way to import their
vast clipart collections into the new tool and still maintain the keywords
and all that.

At one point, I heard that MS might make a migration tool available, but I
don't know that it ever happened. Hopefully Paul Ballou or Mary Sauer will
be by shortly, though -- they're really the experts when it comes to this
kind of stuff.

 

[Paul Ballou]

Hi Martin,
You can right click the clips in the collection to remove the clips.
The clips are either online or if downloaded in the Microsoft Clip Organizer
folder in the My Pictures Folder. The collection information is stored in
the catalog files and the only way you might remove the collection is to
remove the catalog files but I would not recommend doing this because it
would have undesired results.

--
Paul Ballou
MVP Office
http://office.microsoft.com/home
http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/
http://www.ballousgiftshop.com/p1152b/

Life would be easier if we could view the source code