Microsoft Office Icons for Development?

Question

Unfortunately Microsoft Office icons etc are copyright by Microsoft and they prevent us from using them in Developed applications with their licence terms.

I'm trying to find some alternative Microsoft Office icons who's licence allows for both commercial use in developed applications. One of the important things is that anyone looking at them can instantly recognise what they represent (e.g. Excel).

Does anyone know of any and have links to them?

Answer 1

Visual studio comes with an image library containing a lot of icons that are in a similar style to Office. These are for use in any application. I am unsure of the exact copyright on them so you might want to google it.

You can find the image library zip at:

C:\program files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\VS2008ImageLibrary\1033

Answer 2

Don't look exactly like the office icons of course, if they did they would be the copyrighted office icons and not an alternative, but I personally like the Silk Icon set. It's free and contains many nice looking and useful icons.

It's a preview of all the icons as well there.

As for icons representing excel documents, etc, you could for example use the page_white_excel icon. Think there should be some more general spreadsheet icons there too, but can't find it now...

Answer 3

You can have a look at Deviant Art :

Office icons

But it's likely that what is proposed there is already breaking Microsoft license though.

Answer 4

I'm guessing you mean file icons, not the applications. As long as office is installed you can use code to load the icons at runtime e.g. GetFileIcon("doc", SHGFI_ICONSIZE_LARGE)

    const uint SHGFI_ICON = 0x100;
    const uint SHGFI_USEFILEATTRIBUTES = 0x10; // Use file extension not name
    const uint SHGFI_ICONSIZE_SMALL = 1;
    const uint SHGFI_ICONSIZE_LARGE = 0;
    const uint FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL = 0;
    const uint FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY = 16;

    [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
    struct SHFILEINFO
    {
        public IntPtr hIcon;
        public IntPtr iIcon;
        public uint dwAttributes;
        [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValTStr, SizeConst = 260)]
        public string szDisplayName;
        [MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.ByValTStr, SizeConst = 80)]
        public string szTypeName;
    }

    [DllImport("shell32.dll")]
    private static extern IntPtr SHGetFileInfo(string pszPath, uint dwFileAttributes, ref SHFILEINFO psfi, uint cbSizeFileInfo, uint uFlags);

    static System.Drawing.Icon GetFileIcon(string extension, uint size)
    {
        IntPtr hImgResult;    //the handle to the system image list
        SHFILEINFO shinfo = new SHFILEINFO();

        if (string.Compare(extension,"folder",true)==0)
        {
            hImgResult = SHGetFileInfo("", FILE_ATTRIBUTE_DIRECTORY, ref shinfo,
                                       (uint)Marshal.SizeOf(shinfo),
                                        SHGFI_ICON | size);
        }
        else
        {
            hImgResult = SHGetFileInfo(extension, FILE_ATTRIBUTE_NORMAL, ref shinfo,
                                       (uint)Marshal.SizeOf(shinfo),
                                        SHGFI_ICON | SHGFI_USEFILEATTRIBUTES | size);
        }
        return System.Drawing.Icon.FromHandle(shinfo.hIcon);
    }

Answer 5

How about the Tango Icon Library then? Also looks nice and have a wide variety of icons. They are also in png (which I believe is the best really...) but also in svg. And the pngs are in 16x16, 22x22 and 32x32 sizes.

Answer 6

I am a fan of dry icons.

http://dryicons.com/free-icons/preview/classy-icons-set/

here is the free use license

http://dryicons.com/terms/#free-license

Answer 7

Unfortunately I've been unable to find anything that is similar to the Office icons, while being safe enough to not infinge Microsoft Copyright. There were some very good ones on DevianArt, however they looked like they'd almost been ripped off from the MS ones so we decided not to use them.

Should any come up I'll update this answer :)