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When printed, transparent areas (transparency: The quality that defines how much light passes through an object's pixels. If an object is 100 percent transparent, light passes through it completely and renders the object invisible; in other words, you can see through the object.) in pictures are the same color as the paper on which they're printed. In an electronic display — such as a Web page — transparent areas are the same color as the background. Metafiles (metafile: A vector-based graphic. Metafiles are represented as collections of lines rather than pixels, so you can manipulate them without the distortions common to bitmap (raster) graphics.), such as those with shapes, usually have transparent areas.

You cannot make more than one color in a picture transparent. Because an area of what appears to be a single color (for example, blue sky) might actually be made up of a range of subtle color variations, the color that you select might appear in only a small area. Therefore, it might be difficult to see the transparent effect.

Although you cannot make more than one color transparent by clicking Set Transparent Color on the Picture toolbar (toolbar: A bar with buttons and options that you use to carry out commands. To display a toolbar, press ALT and then SHIFT+F10.), you can make such changes in another image editing program. You can then save the picture in a format that preserves that transparency information (such as a .png file) and insert the file in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Although you cannot change the transparency of an animated GIF (animated GIF: A file that contains a series of Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) images that are displayed in rapid sequence by some Web browsers to produce an animated effect.) picture by using the Picture toolbar, you can make such changes in an animated GIF editing program, and then insert the file in PowerPoint.