Remove background of clipart (part 1)

Remove background of clipart (part 1)

PowerPoint has a remove background function starting with version 2007. Works great with pictures and clipart. But sometimes you will not be able to remove the background of a clipart, that is the case when a clipart has been drawn using a vector based program.

Clipart is available in PowerPoint, just go to Insert - click ClipArt button - type in an appropriate keyword in the search pane and your done. But sometimes the clipart is not 100 % what you were after. So can you edit it and remove an unwanted background for example?

Take this example:
When you select the clipart the remove background button stays grey. Yet I have managed to remove it.

How, well not all that difficult, just insert the clipart, then right-click on it. In the quick menu choose, Edit picture.

You will see a dialog asking you if you want to convert to a Microsoft Office drawing object, click Yes.

Nothing seems to have changed to the object at first. But don't be fooled, click in the clipart you will see that you'll be able to select different parts of the object.

Ungrouping should give the following result:

This allows you to edit all individual objects to your liking.

After converting to a Microsoft Office drawing object, just click on the background of the clipart en press delete.

Using this method will ensure there is no loss of quality in the clipart.

In a next blog entry I will give you a second way to remove the background and this time I will by using the Remove background button.