Microsoft has announced it has done away with the expansive Clip Art library long associated with its Office suite of software, marking the end of an era for fans of the abstract, fuzzy cartoons used in desktop publishing, documents, invitations, greeting cards and presentations since the 90s.

There were only 82 illustrations built into Word 6.0 in 1996, but the collection eventually grew to more than 100,000 static and moving images housed online.

Goodbye Microsoft Clip Art, it's a shame we never figured out what you were trying to communicate.

From now, stock and royalty-free images will be served to Office applications via Microsoft's Bing Images.

Nostalgia-inducing though the baffling old images may be, the move makes sense given that anyone looking to insert images into a presentation or document is now far more likely to search on Google (or Bing?) than make do with whatever they can find in Clip Art.