Remove and Change Background in Microsoft Office 2010

There are times that you need to edit the photo that you have inserted in your document, earlier versions of Microsoft Office offers you crop, and enhancements for color, brightness and contrast. In 2007 came the gallery but if you need to remove the background you are forced to use another application. In 2010, Microsoft Office came up with the feature to easily remove and replace the background of the selected image. To do this, just follow the quick and easy steps.

Note: This feature works in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and New Message in Outlook, 2010 and 2015 versions.

Step 1: Select the image and click on Picture Tools in the Ribbon. In the left most part of the Ribbon, you will see the Remove Background icon.


Step 2: Once you’ve selected the Remove Background, purple color will indicate the parts of the image that will be removed. In cases, you want to edit the selected background, you can use the Background Removal tools located in the Ribbon.

In our example below, let’s say you only need two penguins, click Mark Areas To Remove, then draw a line to the other penguin and if you’re satisfied, click on Keep Changes.

CHANGE BACKGROUND
Now that we have removed the background and we are going to use one of our photos in our collection, all we need to do is use the contextual menu.

Step 1: Right click on the image, then select Format Picture.


Step 2: From the Format Picture dialog box, select FILL, then PICTURE or TEXTURE FILL. Select FILE, to select the image for your background.



Let’s say, we’ll use the Lighthouse image for our background


Here’s our output for our sample image.


If you want to resize the subject and the background, simply use the CROP feature.


When we crop our image, we can just simply drag the handles to resize the subject to compliment our background.

I hope this tutorial will help you create better documents in Word and improve your presentation when you use PowerPoint. :)