I'm going to show you one of my favorite features in PowerPoint 2007 - Themes.
A theme is a predefined combination of colors, fonts, and effects that can be applied to
your presentation. Instead of spending time formatting your slides,
built-in themes allow you to easily create professional-looking presentations.
When you create a new presentation there is a theme applied even though the slide background
is white. This theme is called the Office Theme and
it is the default theme for all presentations. Now that I've started my presentation, I'm
ready to apply a different theme to my slides and make the presentation look professional.
To view the built-in themes, select the Design tab and locate the Themes group.
Each of these thumbnail images represents a theme.
If you don't see one you like, click the drop-down arrow to access More themes.
And now we can see a few more in the menu that appears.
You'll also notice that you have the option of accessing themes on Microsoft Office Online
or creating your own.To see a live preview of the theme in the presentation, just hover
over an image. The name of the theme will appear and a live
preview of it will appear on the selected slide.You may have noticed that with some
of the themes, the text I already have on my slides may not fit correctly.
Some people choose to add a theme to their presentation before they even start entering
their text so that this won't happen, but some people prefer to insert some or all of
their text onto their slides before formatting it.
You'll find what works for you. And don't worry, if you like a theme that
doesn't look quite right, we'll show you how to modify it.
Now, to select a theme, just click it. Let's try this Aspect theme.
In lesson 3, I changed the fonts on the title slide from the default Calibri to Imprint
MT Shadow and Brush Script MT. You'll see that those fonts did not change
when I applied the new theme. When you change a font for specific text,
that font will be the same no matter which theme you choose.
But, on the other slides, you'll see that the default Calibri has changed for the body
and title text. If you want to change to a new theme and see
how the colors and fonts change, just click the theme you'd like to use.
Here...I like this Urban one. You can see that a new background and colors
have been applied to each slide. Also, each slide has this accent at the top
that is part of the Urban theme. The fonts are still the same on the title
slide, but the text on the other slides has changed.
If you're happy with the way a theme looks when you apply it to your slides, you are
finished formatting your presentation with just that one click! Sometimes you may not
find a theme that is exactly what you had in mind, but if you choose one that gets you
close to what you want, then you can change the theme colors, fonts, and effects individually.
I'm pretty happy with this theme, but I want to show you how you can change the individual
components. To change the Theme Colors, select the Colors
command in the Themes group on the Design tab.
As you hover over each color group, a live preview of the color combination will appear
in the presentation. If you like any of these, just click it to
select it. Or, if you like the theme you have currently,
but just want to change some of the colors, just click Create New Theme Colors.
This opens a dialog box where you can change any of the theme colors.
For example, I could click the Accent Two color box and choose a new color.
Then, give a name for this new color combination we'll name it Workshop, and click Save.
Now you can see the color change reflected in the Urban theme.
You can change your theme fonts, just like you did with the theme colors.
Since our title slide fonts won't change, I'll just select slide 2 to show you how this
works. Just click the Fonts command.
As you hover over each font option, you'll see the fonts displayed on the slide.
If you see an option you like, just click it to select it, or choose Create New Theme
Fonts to modify the current theme or create an entirely new one.
The theme effects command changes the default effects for pictures, charts, SmartArt graphics
and more. We'll just leave that as it is right now.
In addition to themes, you have background styles.
You can apply a background style to a theme to change the background color.
Let's click the Background Styles command to take a look at the available styles.
It doesn't look like much, I know, but these styles are really neat.
The background colors are all colors that blend nicely with the Urban theme and colors.
Just click a style to select it. Notice how the text changed to a light color
when we chose a dark background color? Dark slides have light text and light slides have
dark text. What makes the background styles interesting
is that the color options change based on the theme you are using.
For example, if I switch to another theme, the background styles available will be different.From
here you can also select Format Background to open a dialog box and make changes to the
color transparency, gradient fill, and more. There is a lot you can do here, but I'll let
you explore that on your own. I actually don't want to use a different theme
or background style, so I'm just going to go back to my Themes group and click on my
Urban theme. I hope you can see how powerful themes are
in PowerPoint 2007 and how you can use background styles to customize the presentation even more.