This video shows you how you can use the remove background button in Microsoft PowerPoint to remove a background from an image in PowerPoint. This could be useful if you are creating teaching resources and need an image without a background to layer over the top of something else.

[Transcription of the above video]

In this video I’m going to show you how to remove the background from an image simply by using PowerPoint. So I’ve come to the royalty free stock image website Pixabay and I’m going to search for an image of a cat and I’m going to look through these images and I found one here and I’m going to use that. But as you can see this image has got a background, but perhaps for this project I don’t want the image to have a background, or I’d like to put this image onto a different background.

So I’m going to download and save this image. And then I’m going to open the image in PowerPoint. And then with the picture selected, you go to the Picture Format tab.

And over to the left hand side you’ll find the handy little remove background button. When you click the button, PowerPoint automatically detects and selects as much of the background as it can, but there are some additional useful tools to help you fine tune your selection. Mark areas to keep and mark areas to remove.

Use these tools to select part of the image that PowerPoint hasn’t automatically removed, or parts of the image that haven’t been selected that you want to keep. When you’re finished, click on Keep Changes and you’ll see the background is then removed and the image now has a transparent background.

You can then right click on your image that you’ve removed the background from and save it as a PNG file so that you can use it with its transparent background in other projects and that’s how to remove a background from an image in PowerPoint. Why not give it a go?