I came up with this concept while working on the front end of the Regional Emergency response solution. When trying to templatize some work that was done for a specific customer, I realized that the accent color I had applied would not look good when branding for other customers – as dark logos did not show up well against a dark blue background.

Transparency in PowerPoint

To get around the branding issue, I switched from dark blue to White accents in the banner…. and hated it. I went with this version for a couple days, and then one night at around midnight an idea popped into my head…

What if I cut out sections of my background image and let the page background show through??? I was excited to try it out so I shot out of bed and headed to the computer. It was a little painful at first to land the shapes how I wanted to, but it worked!

How to build your background in PowerPoint with Transparent Elements

If you are not familiar with my process for building backgrounds, check out my post on Background Concepts to get started.

Merging Shapes

Start off by building your complete background with your ideal accents. I will keep this one simple so it is easy to follow, but you can get very advanced using these techniques.

Next, Select your underlying shape (big rectangle in this case) and your accent shapes. Be intentional with your click order here, as PowerPoint will use the formatting of the first selected object in the next step.

With your objects selected, go to the Shape Format options in the ribbon and Select Merge Shapes and combine

You are now left with a big rectangle underlying that has cut-out transparency

Bring your new background into Power BI Desktop

You can now edit your accent colors by adjusting your Page Background color in the visualizations pane:

If you have really complicated shapes you can look at using the other Merge Shape functions, such as Fragment.

Hope this is helpful! Check out the background gallery to download this background example and more.