Clip Organizer in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows

Before we start discussing the Clip Organizer in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows, it's important to first understand its scope. At the most basic level, the Clip Organizer is an entry level digital asset management tool that lets you organize your clip media.

We already learned how you can add media to the Clip Organizer within our Adding Clips to the Clip Organizer in PowerPoint 2010 tutorial. However, PowerPoint just interfaces via this option to a tool called the Clip Organizer that you can also launch as a separate standalone program. And adding media via PowerPoint is just the beginning, as you can do so much more with the Clip Organizer.

Follow these steps to learn more in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows:

1. Launch Microsoft Clip Organizer by clicking the Windows Start button and then choosing the Microsoft Office | Microsoft Office 2010 Tools | Microsoft Clip Organizer option, as shown in Figure 1.
2. 
   Figure 1: Microsoft Clip Organizer option
2. This opens the Microsoft Clip Organizer interface, as shown in Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Microsoft Clip Organizer interface
4. Options within the Microsoft Clip Organizer interface are explained below, as marked in Figure 2, above:

A. Menu Bar

5. Here, you'll find menus such as File, Edit, View, etc. that help you to create new collections, rename existing collections, etc.

B. Help Bar

6. Type in the keyword(s) to get related help.

C. Standard Toolbar

7. This toolbar consists of several buttons:

Search and Collection List

8. This is essentially a tabbed option. Either the Search or the Collection List option can be active. By default, the Collection List button is active, resulting in the Collection List pane being shown (see Figure 2, above).

Copy, Paste, and Delete

9. These buttons help you copy, paste, and delete any selected clips.

Clips Online

10. This button used to open the Office.com page where you could search and download additional clips. This option has now been deprecated and now just opens a page that says any such page is no longer available (see Figure 3, below).
11. 
    Figure 3: Office.com Clip Art is no longer available

D. Collection List Pane

12. By default this pane is active, and within this pane you can see all available Collections listed. You can switch to the Search pane by clicking the Search button on the Standard toolbar. We explain this further in our Create and Organize Collections in Clip Organizer tutorial.

E. Preview Area

13. Here you can see all the clips within the selected collection. If you are using the Search pane, this same area will display search results

Learn more about the Clip Organizer in the following tutorials. Do note that all these tutorials relate to the Clip Organizer that gets installed as part of Microsoft Office 2000.