Bacon Bits:

Since John Walkenbach shut down his J-Walk blog back in 2011, I've been reading his Google Plus page where I get a daily regimen of the silly, odd, and absurd things he finds on the internet. It's usually good for a few good chuckles. But today I actually learned something new about Excel.

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John mentioned that Excel can remove the background from an imported image. I didn't know that! I'm guessing most of Excel's non-artistic nerd community missed this too.

Apparently, this feature works in Excel 2010 and Excel 2013 (not sure about 2007).

Here's the deal:

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Let's say I import a picture like this one into Excel, and I want to crop out everything except the picture of John playing the banjo on the right.

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I can click on the picture while it's in Excel, and choose the Remove Background command on the far left of the Format tab.

This immediately puts a purple box around my picture.

I start by adjusting the handles to the area that I want to keep. Excel does a pretty good job getting close to removing everything but John. But you can see that it missed his feet, part of his head, and part of the banjo (they're still in purple).

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So this is where I can use a few commands on the Background Removal tab.

Mark Areas to Keep: Allows me to tag the areas to keep in my picture

Mark Areas to Remove: Allows me to tag the areas to crop out

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The idea is to select Mark Areas to Keep and draw a line through the areas that I want to keep. Then I select Mark Areas to Remove and draw a line through all the areas that I want removed.

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Once I'm ready, I can click the Keep Changes command. My reward is this fine picture of Zen Walkenbach playing banjo on one foot.

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He looked uncomfortable, so I gave him something to sit on.

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Thanks for the tip John!