How to Insert Clip Art in Word 2019 and Word 365 Step by Step
Microsoft retired its classic Clip Art gallery years ago, but plenty of Australians still search for an easy way to drop pictures into a Word document. Whether you're prepping a newsletter for a school in Brisbane, drafting a flyer for a café in Fremantle, or putting together a community handout in Hobart, the modern Insert menu offers several routes to the illustrations that once lived behind the paperclip icon.
Word 2019 and Word 365 both include built-in access to thousands of royalty-free icons, stock photographs, 3D models and cut-out people. Finding them can feel a bit like searching for a decent flat white in a new town — you know it's there, but the menu names don't always match what you remember.
Why the old Clip Art button disappeared
In Office 2010 and earlier, clicking Insert > Clip Art opened a searchable gallery of illustrations curated by Microsoft. By 2014 the company began phasing this feature out, and Office 2016 removed it entirely. The cited reason was licensing complexity: many images came from external providers whose contracts were hard to renew.
The change hit Australian users hard in education. Primary school teachers in Sydney and Perth had built reading programmes around themed pictures, and the gallery's disappearance forced them to rebuild resource folders from scratch. IT coordinators in Adelaide council offices spent months helping staff transition to Insert > Pictures > Online Pictures, which pulls from Bing.
Step-by-step for Word 2019 users
Word 2019 is a one-off purchase rather than a subscription, so its media features are fixed at what shipped in late 2018. The Insert tab still gives you several useful options.
Place the cursor where you want the illustration to appear. Click Insert in the ribbon, then choose Icons. A panel slides in from the right showing hundreds of vector graphics sorted by category. Type a keyword, pick an icon, and press Insert. The icon drops into your document and can be resized by pulling the squares at its corners.
For photographs, click Insert > Pictures > Online Pictures instead. Word passes your search term to Bing and returns Creative Commons-licensed results. Read the filter settings carefully, because Bing occasionally returns copyright-protected images. Right-click any inserted image to choose Wrap Text, which lets paragraphs flow around the illustration.
Adapting the process for Word 365
Microsoft 365 subscribers receive regular updates, so the Insert tab often gains new options that standalone Word 2019 cannot run. The layout is similar, but Word 365 adds a Stock Images entry alongside Icons and Online Pictures.
Click Insert > Pictures > Stock Images. A wider panel appears with tabs for Icons, Illustrations, Photos, Cutout People and 3D Models. The Illustrations tab is the closest successor to the retired Clip Art gallery, offering hand-drawn style graphics rather than flat icons. Filter by collection — choosing Office shows assets matching Microsoft's modern visual style.
Word 365 also supports Insert > Draw, letting you sketch with a mouse or stylus and convert the doodle into a shape. For organisations with a Microsoft 365 Business Standard plan, the Stock Images library is accessible from PowerPoint and Excel too, so graphics can be reused across programmes.
Troubleshooting common insertion problems
If Insert icons appear greyed out, the document is probably protected or opened in Compatibility Mode. Click File > Info > Convert to update an older .doc file to the modern .docx format, which unlocks the visual features. A corrupted graphics driver is another common culprit; updating through Windows Update usually fixes it.
Copyright is a frequent worry. Icons shipped with Word are royalty-free for use inside Microsoft documents, but redistributing them on a website or printing on t-shirts requires checking the specific licence. Stock images from Bing are typically Creative Commons-licensed, permitting commercial use with attribution — though requirements vary, so read the small print.
Online Pictures returns fewer results for Australian-specific terms. Searching for "Australian wildlife" works well, but queries like "footy" or "arvo" may not match American spelling. Adding a generic term like "Australia" alongside the local phrase usually solves this.
Free clip art alternatives worth bookmarking
When Word's built-in libraries fall short, a handful of reputable websites fill the gap. OpenClipart.org hosts public-domain vector drawings, ideal for community newsletters and school projects. Pixabay and Unsplash offer high-resolution photographs under permissive licences, while The Noun Project specialises in simple monochrome icons.
Australian designers also contribute to Wikimedia Commons, which carries illustrations of native flora and fauna — useful for geography resources or tourism brochures. The Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development in Western Australia publishes its own open-licence image library for educational use.
For themed collections bundling classroom graphics and document decorations into organised packs, browse the theme catalogue curated for small businesses and educators. Downloaded packs can be unzipped and dropped into Word via Insert > Pictures > This Device, keeping everything local on your machine.
Practical tips for Australian contexts
Stick to Australian English spelling — colour, organisation, centre — and check that any pulled-in icon names match the local dialect. For school projects, save illustrations in a dedicated subfolder on the school network drive so students across year levels can reuse them. Many Catholic and independent schools in Melbourne and Canberra already follow this approach, which keeps file sizes manageable on ageing classroom computers.
Small businesses often need clip art for invoices, menus and social media posts. Use Word's Icon library for in-house documents where sharp scaling matters, but switch to a Stock Images photograph for marketing collateral on Instagram or printed flyers. The Victorian Small Business Commission publishes templates that demonstrate this mixed approach well.
| Feature | Word 2019 | Word 365 |
|---|---|---|
| Insert > Icons | Yes, ~200 vector icons | Yes, ~300+ icons plus updates |
| Stock Images panel | Not available | Icons, Illustrations, Photos, Cutout People, 3D Models |
| Online Pictures (Bing) | Yes | Yes, with improved filtering |
| Insert > Draw | Not available | Available with mouse or stylus |
| Cloud-synced media library | Not available | Available across Word, PowerPoint, Excel |
| Offline access to inserted media | Local files only | Local cache plus OneDrive backup |
| Suitability for large graphics libraries | Moderate | Higher, thanks to monthly content updates |
Recommendations for a smoother workflow
- Build a personal swipe file: every time you insert an icon you like, save a copy in OneNote or a local folder for later reuse.
- Filter Stock Images by collection rather than scrolling endlessly — Office and Education contain the most versatile graphics for business and classroom use.
- Set Word's default image insertion to In Line with Text, then change to Wrap Text on a case-by-case basis to avoid layout jumps in long documents.
- Keep a folder of attribution notes whenever you pull an image from OpenClipart or Wikimedia Commons, since Creative Commons licences often require a credit.
- For shared documents, convert inserted icons to shapes (right-click > Convert to Shape) so colleagues can recolour them without the original licence.
- Test documents on older hardware. Word 2019 lacks the render optimisations of Word 365, and complex clip art can slow down ageing laptops — common in regional offices across the Top End.
- Update Office regularly if you are on a Microsoft 365 plan; new graphics arrive weekly and missing them means redoing searches that previously worked.
Ready to put it into practice? Browse the curated clip art packs and download a free set to experiment with the Insert menu. Try inserting an icon into a blank document, then a photograph from the Stock Images panel, and notice how the wrap settings change the way your text flows. Within half an hour you'll have rebuilt the kind of illustrated document that used to live behind the old Clip Art button — just with a slightly different route to get there.