Set Transparent Color for Images in Microsoft Word

I once had to add a image into a Word document that had a black background which looked awful when printing the document. Microsoft Word comes with a few basic possibilities to alter graphics that are added which includes changing colors of the image and defining a transparent color for the image.

It was an easy task to set the black background color to transparent which had the result that the image was showing without the black background. Here is how I did that in Microsoft Word 2007. After adding the image to Microsoft Word you left-click the icon to bring up the graphics menu.

Click on Recolor in the left menu that is called Adjust and select Set Transparent Color there. Now click on the color that you want to make transparent. There are some limitations though. You can only make one color transparent which means that if your image has different similar looking colors as the background this won’t bring the desired results.

You could use an image editor like GIMP or Paint.net to change the color of the background image to one solid one or make it match the background color of the document.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday January 2, 2008 -
Tags:document, microsoft word, word

Responses so far:

1. ren says:

   February 6, 2009 at 3:16 am

   You rock my friend. ROCK.

   Reply
2. jim quinn says:

   December 28, 2009 at 9:21 pm

   This doesn’t work for Word 2008.

   Reply
3. Bob says:

   January 14, 2010 at 12:14 pm

   Great, thanks! (in Word 2007)

   Reply
4. anonymus says:

   February 16, 2010 at 11:13 pm

   it do not wrk cannot find recolour plz help ;)

   Reply
5. gaz says:

   March 15, 2011 at 1:30 pm

   Ok thanks will try this.

   Reply
6. IroK233 says:

   March 18, 2011 at 1:13 am

   It’s working – thank you.

   Reply
7. Diana Noyes says:

   August 26, 2011 at 3:53 am

   I can get this to work on 1 of my 3 computers. Not sure why, but the computer it works on is W XP, the other two are Windows 7. Is there something else I need to do.

   Thanks

   Reply
   • ann says:

     September 9, 2011 at 4:46 am

     I’m using windows 7, just click the object, then click on format, then click recolor under recolor select set transparent color tool then click on the part of the object that u want to become transparent

     Reply