Are there any alternatives to Microsoft Office icons that I can use in my application?

Question

Microsoft Office icons are copyrighted by Microsoft and this prevents us from using them in non-Microsoft applications due to their licence terms.

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

Does anyone know of any alternative icons and have links to them?

Answer 1

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 2

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 3

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