Understanding Themes in Microsoft Office (At Last!)
- What is a Theme?
- Themes from the Inside Out
- Applying a Theme
- Understanding Theme Colors
- Understanding Theme Fonts
- Understanding Theme Effects
- What About Style Sets?
- Creating Custom Color and Font Sets
- Creating Your Own Theme
- Transferring a Custom Theme to Another Computer
- Using a Transferred Theme
- Conclusion
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Microsoft introduced themes back in Office 2007, but sad to say, most people don’t understand themes today any better than they did back then. They could tell you that a theme has something to do with styles, formatting, and colors, but if you press them for details, you get averted eyes and foot-shuffling. Is a theme built into a document, or is it a separate file? Is a theme the same thing as a template? How do you share themes between applications? In this article, I hope to clear up some of the persistent confusion around what exactly a theme is and how it does its magic.
What is a Theme?
A theme is a named group of settings that you can apply to a document to change its appearance. At a minimum, it includes three elements: colors, fonts, and effects. (In PowerPoint, your choice of theme also affects a couple of other aspects of the presentation, such as background image and variants.) Themes have names, such as Facet, Integral, and Ion; these names are the same across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so you can use the same theme in each application for consistency.
A theme is not the same as a template. A template is an entire document file (or workbook, or presentation), but with a different extension to designate it a template rather than a regular document. It’s a full-fledged reusable sample. A theme, on the other hand, is just a collection of settings that can be applied to a document.
Is a theme a separate file? Well, it depends on what you mean by theme. The word can refer to the current theme settings in a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document file, and in that sense, a theme is contained within the document to which it is applied. But theme can also refer to a file with a .thmx extension that stores theme settings independently of any data file.