The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” usually applies to business documents! Whether it’s illustrating a product or just making the document more visually appealing the ability to insert pictures into a document is something we do all the time.

However, working with pictures can be a time consuming process.

Luckily for us Word has some very powerful tools to help. Including one that in past would have required a graphic artist armed with a copy of Photoshop!

So once again let's imagine I work for Widgets Ltd and lets start by inserting a picture into a blank Word document.

Here is a picture of a product I sell (let's call it a "Ticking Widget")

I've paid a photographer to take some nice product shots but now that I need to use it in a document that lovely off-white/grey background isn't needed.

I could try cropping it.

It sort of works but i've still got they grey background which doesn't work well against the white of the document. This wil be highlighted even more when it's printed.

So what can we do about it?

Normally you'd need to fire up a graphics editing package such as Adobe Photoshop and remove the background. This requires a high level of skill as well as the costs involved with owning a copy of Photoshop.

Thankfully Office 2010 can help us.

One of the tools on the Picture Tools tab is called "Remove Background"

When I click this tool look what happens

The purple areas are parts of the image Word has calculated to be a part of the background and need to be removed. Word has done a pretty good job on this image but it can only make a best guess though and you'll notice that parts of the clock are missing at the top and the bottom. We can give Word a helping hand to tidy this up.

The first thing is resize the box to fit closer to the edge of the clock. This tells Word that everything OUTSIDE that box must be background so we can ignore it

Then we use the tools to mark parts of the picture, telling Word what to keep and what to remove.

You can see the lines I've drawn across the clock to indicate how to deal with the areas it's not sure about. Once I'm happy I can click the "Keep Changes" option or discard the changes and start again.

This is what the finished product looks like!

Now I can add some text to my document

For added effect I'll also change the text wrapping option to "Tight".

See how the text fits around the shape of the clock now that there is no background!

Finally if I change the wrapping so that the image floats over the text you'll notice that we can even see the text through the handle at the top of the clock!

As you can see it only took with a few minutes and a couple of mouse clicks to acheive something that in the past would have a required a much high level of skill and time.

If you're like to learn more about Microsoft Office 2010 and how you can use it in your business please get in touch.