Collection
Microsoft Office 97 Clipart
mso97clipart · 1996
3,186 objects held · 3,031 on display
This collection is the clip-art library bundled with Microsoft Office 97 Professional (English) — recovered here from the circulating installation media rather than reissued from any product. It was never sold as clip art. It shipped as an accessory to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint: the gallery a 1997 office worker opened from a menu, not a title bought off a shelf. That incidental status is exactly why it circulated so widely, and why so much of it survives. Of the material catalogued here, the imagery reads as a self-portrait of the late-1990s white-collar workplace it was drawn to furnish — figures at desks, handshakes, beige monitors, conference tables. Among the eight distinct publisher chains represented across the wider archive, Microsoft is the plainest case: the same corporation that published this material in 1996 is the same active corporation today, with no merger, buyout, or renaming standing between the two. It is the largest single holding on open display, and the least ambiguous in its origin.
- Disclosure
- Publisher: Microsoft Corporation — active, and unambiguously the same entity today as in 1996. Recovered from circulating Office 97 Professional media; no rights are claimed by this archive.