If we leave them purple, they will be removed from the image. In the snapshot above, you can see that the stem of the flower and part of a petal appear purple. Drag the handles outward to keep more of the image. If there is purple on any areas of your image that you want to keep, you can drag the handles of the bounding box that appears over the image. The areas that appear in purple are the areas that Word has determined are background areas that it needs to remove. Your image's background – and possibly your image – will also change colors. Don't worry. This is temporary. When you click the Remove Background button, you will see the Background Removal tab appear on the Ribbon. To use this tool, double click on the image for which you want to remove the background. Click on the Remove Background button in the Adjust group under the Picture Tools Format tab. We are going to remove the background from our image: This tool allows you to remove backgrounds from your images. Perhaps one of the most useful photo editing tools found in Word 2016 is the background removal tool. Although Microsoft Word is a word processing program, it also offers some photo editing tools, as we've already seen in this article.