Circa Power Point 3, there was the possibility to use a black & white device independent bitmap with transparency. As I remember, the bitmap was saved in MS Paint to the format. When inserted into Power Point, there was a recolor command, and you coould change black to a color. It was posible to stack several together containing different colors to get a transparent colored graphic. This is the best as I remember after such a long time. I always traced to vector, and deleted the backgrounds in those versions. Rich