How to use an image as background of a PowerPoint slide

Using an image as the background of your slide can add impact to your message.  It’s possible to do this by adding the image to the slide and using ‘send to back’, but there is a better way.

This post is part of our hints and tips for standard PowerPoint features.  PPT Productivity is a time saving add-in for PowerPoint.  If you’d like to boost your productivity and stop wasting time on alignment, formatting and finding slides to reuse then please visit the PPT Productivity homepage and download our free trial today!

How to make an image a background in PowerPoint: To add an image to the background in PowerPoint, simply right-click anywhere on your slide, or the area around your slide, and select Format Background. The Format Background panel will then appear on the right-hand side of your screen. Select the Fill tab then click the “Picture or texture fill” radio button.

Under ‘Picture source’ select Insert, or if you have the image already copied, select clipboard.  The insert option will allow you choose your image from a file on your computer or local network, a Microsoft Stock image, an online source or the icon library.

Once you have selected the image, click ok. The selected image will become the background of the entire slide.

If you want the same background image applied to all slides throughout the whole presentation, click ‘Apply to all’ at the bottom of the Format Picture panel. The image will now appear as the background on all the slides in the presentation.

If you decide you want to remove the image – simply click ‘Reset Background’

If you use a lot of images in your presentations to support content rather than to fill the slide background, our PPT Productivity Gallery feature can help!  Use the shapes library to save and name any commonly used images (or shapes or entire slides!) for easy reuse from within PowerPoint.  Download the free trial now