PowerPoint 2010 Remove Background is Greyed Out!

The Remove Background tool is new in 2010 and it's great. Sometimes though, even when a picture is selected the command is not enabled. Usually you will see that Artistic Effects is greyed out too!

What's Going On Here!

The reason is almost always because you have a VECTOR image selected. Neither of these controls work with vectors but only with bitmaps.

If you don't know the difference usually vectors will NOT look like a photo but more like a drawing and when you increase the size say x10 a bitmap image will be noticeably fuzzy whereas a vector will still look good.

So How to Remove the Background?

In most cases you can CUT the vector image and paste Special as a PNG. This will look exactly the same bbut the Remove Background and Artistic Effects should now be live.

The Result