I had the same issue and found that selecting the figure and using the Save As Image
approach detailed in this SO answer produced incorrect results when the output format is set to PDF (using Office for Mac 2016).
The workaround I found was to post-process the PDFs with Inkscape in the following way:
- open the pdf in Inkscape
- select everything with
Ctrl+a
- hit
Ctrl+Shift+g
repeatedly to ungroup the elements in the PDF - deselect everything
- select the background layer and delete it
Ctrl+s
to save the PDF again