Image: OpenClipArt displayed in Mac installation of OpenOffice 3.x

One of the complaints users have with OpenOffice is what a pain it is to download an Office suite to find it’s missing clipart. Sure, you can go out on the Web and pull images from a variety of sources, but…what if you want something simple, quick, and not breathtakingly beautiful? Sometimes, “breathtakingly beautiful” can slow you down (smile).

Note: You can find image source sites and clipart sites online.

Thanks to this tweet from GardenGlen for his link to How to Add Clipart to OpenOffice. The Clipart being added is the collection available at Open Clip Art Library. Some more information on the Open Clip Art Library:

…individual images are in the public domain. This is what it means for images to be clip-art. People have to be able to use the images in their presentations, signs, fliers, greeting cards, bulletins, and other documents without giving attribution. They can do this with images from traditional hard-copy clip-art books, and they can do it with commercial CD-ROM clip-art collections. They have to be able to do it with our clip-art as well. If you are not willing to allow people to use your images with no strings attached, then you must not contribute them to a clip-art collection, because that is what clip-art is all about….
Source: FAQ – Open Clip Art Library

This is about 1.17 gigs of ClipArt!

After you’ve downloaded the OpenClipArt library, placed the unzipped folder wherever you plan to store it permanently, go to OpenOffice….

Note that my first attempt to do this on a Macbook Pro failed after it appeared to work. I’m trying it again and will report back on success for different platforms.
Update: It didn’t fail, I wasn’t looking in the right place. Sigh. I hope the screenshot at the top of this blog entry clears it up for folks.

Subscribe to Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org

Everything posted on Miguel Guhlin’s blogs/wikis are his personal opinion and do not necessarily represent the views of his employer(s) or its clients. Read Full Disclosure