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adding images to documents
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• screen prints
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the problems with text
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free tools
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• web page design

When you type on a page you probably don't think about it but the white 'paper' is actually a transparent background.

Images, however, tend to be rectangles filled with colours: the colours of your photograph or whatever colour the software puts in for you in order to retain the horizontal and vertical dimensions needed. That 'background' is usually white and so doesn't show until you place it next to something else or on a non-white background.

A gif image can have a colour made to be transparent which can be very useful as these illustrations show.

When saving or exporting an image in gif format there will be an option to select a transparent background. On the Word picture toolbar you can specify a colour to appear transparent too with similar effect.