Can't make white colors become transparent in PowerPoint 2002/XP

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Problem

You bring an image into PowerPoint and attempt to use the transparency tool to make the white pixels in the image transparent, but nothing happens. You can make other colors transparent, just not white. It works with the same image in earlier versions of PowerPoint.

Solutions

• After pasting image into PowerPoint
1. Cut
2. Paste Special, As JPEG or PNG
3. Set Transparent Color now works
• Instead of Pasting into PowerPoint...
1. Paste into an image editing program (PhotoEditor, Paint, etc.)
2. Save as JPEG or PNG
3. In PowerPoint, Insert -> Picture from file
4. Set Transparent Color now works

SP2 for Office XP fixes the problem
SP-2 for Office XP has just been released as of late August, 2002. Article Q325731 says that transparency is one issue that's been fixed with SP-2 and it includes links to a download page.

WARNING
As of late August, 2002 there are reports that installing SP2 makes it impossible to activate embedded OLE information, meaning that content pasted from MSGraph, Excel, Word, Equation Editor, OrgChart and other apps may no longer be editable after you install SP2.

You may want to hold off on this one unless you really need transparency badly and don't need to edit copy/pasted content.

See the information (and caveats) about SP2 here also: Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Office XP Released

Search terms:transparent,transparency,set transparent color,Q318042

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