Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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One of the truly new concepts in Office 2007 (and particularly in PowerPoint) is the notion of themes, which are packages of colors, fonts and effects that can be applied to entire presentations, documents or spreadsheets.

When working with themes it is important to know which elements of a document they impact, and exactly how they work.

In PowerPoint 2007, one of the most critical aspects of Themes is the issue of color choices. If you're an experienced PowerPoint user you worked with Color Schemes in previous versions which had eight major color swatches or choices for a Color Scheme. Changing these was possible in a Custom Color Scheme, and applying a color scheme would change elements in a slide corresponding to the swatches; i.e., Title text color, bullet text color, "accents" (or graphical elements in drawing objects and charts and hyperlinks.

The easiest way to approach Themes is to look at the Colors portion of Themes in PowerPoint.

Here is a slide with the standard Office theme (bland or blank) in PowerPoint 2007.

Figure 1

If I click the Design tab and the Themes color button, and then click Create New Theme Colors, I see the corresponding color swatches for this theme's colors.

Figure 2

Notice that this dialog box is similar to the old Color Schemes, only it has 12 units. The first four all relate to text color and they are now coordinated for maximum contrast and readability in the slide(s).

As Echo Swinford and Geetesh Bajaj point out in the PowerPoint Makeovers book, the first two colors are black and white, "whereas the other two colors are dark and light variations of the same color, although you can use different colors as well. When PowerPoint has to decide which color to use as the default text color for a particular slide..."

...it uses a set of rules. First option is Dark1/Light1, then Light1/Dark1, Dark2/Light2 and Light2/Dark2.

So if I change the first two values in the dialog box to a dark and light shade of blue, and rename the Color Set Blue_Test:

Figure 3

Shazam! The presentation takes on the new Colors and everything stays the same (if we'd changed more of the swatches, different elements in the slide would also change).

Important: While the Colors are added to what seems to be a new Theme in the top of the Design Gallery — it's really the same theme but with a new Custom Color Set with the name Blue_Test.

If you want to go back to the original look, locate the original theme at the top in the gallery in the Design tab — hover your mouse over it to locate it by name and apply it. It's really the same theme but with the original Color Set.

Also if you want to change colors of an element in a particular slide and don't want it to change if a new design or color set is applied, choose a color from the More Colors palette and not one from the More [Fill] Colors area and not one that is currently used in the Color Set — otherwise when a new Theme or Color Set is applied that color will change to conform to the new coordinated colors — a Fill Color will change to the one corresponding to the swatch for Accents in the Theme color set.

Figure 4

A similar pattern holds with fonts. If you click the drop down arrow of the Home tab to select a font, for example, the two top options correspond to the Theme fonts. Text reformatted with either of these selections will be changed in its format if the Theme changes. If you manually change the font, however, then the Theme font should not override it if the Theme is altered.

So how are Fonts changed within Themes? Funny you should ask.

And remember we have only looked at Colors. Themes are also comprised of Fonts and Effects. If we do the same thing with Fonts we can change them to Brussels and we get another variation of the Office Theme, but this time with Blue_Test Colors and Brussels Fonts (which will show up in the drop down arrow of the Home tab to select a font).

Figure 5

A very ugly combination but it makes it easier to figure out how this whole system works.

For example, by changing a color swatch to pink in the Blue_Test Color Set and renaming it to Blue-Test-pink, I changed the fill color of the Arrow. Now I know which swatch is the fill color accent for a drawing object.

Figure 6

What about Effects?

Well in some ways they are based individually on the Color Sets, and in other ways they are attached to entire Themes.

For example, if we apply a Glow effect to the arrow, and hover over the effect to an instant, we can see that the effect is based on the Accent 2 color, with an 8 pt intensity.

Figure 7

We could change this color by clicking More Glow Colors, or if you were paying attention, you'd know we could also change it by applying a different Theme, or changing the Color Set for this Theme.

Now why is this important?

Well in many corporate environments colors matter. And there is a way to choose exactly the right color for any element in your slide based on this system. Unfortunately PowerPoint still does not have a color picker — for example there is no way to isolate and identify a particular shade of blue in the picture in this slide. (Imagine for a moment that this is the corporate logo and a specific shade of blue is required for an element in your slide).

Figure 8

But if I use the Color Picker tool in Ulead PhotoImpact (or PhotoShop or a number of other image editors):

Figure 9

I can locate the RGB or HEX color values in the status bar of the program (or by clicking to select it for a Foreground or Background color and opening that panel).

Figure 10

Figure 11

What do these values tell us? If we return to the Color Set options we looked at earlier, and choose a swatch which want with an exact color, click its drop down arrow and choose More Colors, we can set the exact color value by its RGB number combination.

Figure 12

Now obviously to create a set of branded templates with very specific colors you would only want to go through this process one time.

That's a quick introduction to how themes and their colors work, and if you want you can use this technique, plus trial and error, to create a (branded) set of colors for a unique design or theme for your presentations (or documents and spreadsheets).

And to you might need to augment the process with specific fonts, and finally make sure that certain effects are also available for your slide design team.

I'm not going suggest that this process is easy. Next week we'll look at a tool that may make the process a bit easier — ThemeBuilder from CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source code repository — it will give us a look at how the new XML file formats may make this process a bit more streamlined.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

PowerPoint LIVE 2007: Presentation Paradise in the Big Easy

PowerPoint Makeover 7: No Bullets Presentation

Books and eBooks

Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 Complete Makeover Kit

Microsoft Office 2007 (Video Training)

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