Changing Themes and Colors

Quick reference

• 00:04 Even if you're really good at presentation design, it can take so much time to do,
• 00:08 and if you're in a hurry, it's often best to use whatever design features you can
• 00:12 extract out of PowerPoint.
• 00:14 I think that many people don't realize that PowerPoint itself is both a good
• 00:17 graphic design program.
• 00:19 as well as contains lots of templates and
• 00:20 features that allow various elements in a presentation such as graphics,
• 00:25 colors, and objects to be very well balanced.
• 00:28 In this video, we're going to look at themes in PowerPoint
• 00:31 to apply formatting to various parts of our presentation in a way that will
• 00:34 help us understand how these themes work.
• 00:37 On the Design tab, we can see the preview thumbnails of various themes.
• 00:41 And notice as I move my mouse over the thumbnails, a rack of slide,
• 00:45 updates on the fly, and show us how the changes will affect the slide.
• 00:49 At this point of time no changes have actually been made.
• 00:53 If we click on a particular theme,
• 00:54 we can apply that theme to our current presentation.
• 00:57 And that immediately updates the whole presentation in terms of background
• 01:01 graphics, affects fonts, and possibly even the capitalization of lines of
• 01:06 text within placeholders, if that setting has been enabled as well as the colors.
• 01:11 So let's do some work,
• 01:12 the little instructions that we have here ask us to apply the Facet Theme.
• 01:16 So dropping down the little more button, this is that theme, click, and
• 01:22 we notice that the whole presentation is immediately updated.
• 01:25 We've also been asked to change the variant, and
• 01:27 variants are subsets within a particular theme.
• 01:30 We have in this instance various colors including light and dark ones, so
• 01:35 we'll select this one, and it's applied to the whole presentation.
• 01:39 Now within variants we have the options of changing colors, the various fonts,
• 01:45 the effects that will be applied to shapes within the presentation,
• 01:48 as well as the background style.
• 01:51 So in our instructions we're asked to change the colors to green, yellow,
• 01:56 and moving across, here it is.
• 01:58 Now, while we're in this particular area, we'll explore colors a little bit further.
• 02:02 As we update the colors,
• 02:03 we effectively update our whole presentation through the applied theme.
• 02:08 We click the customized colors menu item, and a dialogue box pops up and
• 02:12 shows us the colors within that particular variation.
• 02:16 The contrast between a light and dark background, and a light and dark text, and
• 02:21 various accents and so on.
• 02:22 We notice that the results are expressed in the thumbnail preview,
• 02:26 including the bars of our charts, and we can save this as we wish or just reset it.
• 02:30 I would suggest that you need to be fairly adept to graphic design before mucking
• 02:34 with the settings here.
• 02:35 But notice particularly these four top colors of the light dark text and
• 02:39 backgrounds.
• 02:41 These are exactly the same as the top, which is the light and dark
• 02:44 background styles in the background styles gallery that we will look at later on, so
• 02:48 this is where they're derived from.
• 02:50 We've also been asked to change our presentation to Calibri font.
• 02:54 Notice that as I move over these various selections,
• 02:56 that the fonts change on the preview of our slide.
• 02:59 Notice also that there are two fonts available in each font theme.
• 03:02 The top most font is used for titles, and the other font is used for
• 03:05 everything else.
• 03:06 So if you select a font theme that has the same top and bottom,
• 03:09 that will be reflected consistently throughout your presentation in all text.
• 03:14 So we apply the font and our entire presentation changes.
• 03:18 We can check that that font has been applied by going to the Home tab and
• 03:21 checking the font listed.
• 03:23 We've been asked to also change the effects to an Extreme Shadow.
• 03:28 Notice that the shapes on the slide change their format as I move my mouse over
• 03:31 the thumbnails.
• 03:33 I select Extreme Shadow, and the presentation is updated.
• 03:37 Finally, we've been asked to apply a background style, so
• 03:40 the background styles affects the background of our slide.
• 03:43 And if we go to a very dark background, the text is still visible.
• 03:47 So remember again, how these derive from those settings in the color dialogue box.
• 03:51 So we select this style, and apply it, and the presentation is updated.
• 03:57 Now let's have another quick look at a feature that we saw in another video,
• 04:02 known as design ideas.
• 04:07 So we Insert a picture on the title slide from the Library on the computer, and
• 04:10 then go to the Design tab, the Design ideas on the Design grid.
• 04:15 And we can try various design ideas that have programmed into this version of
• 04:19 PowerPoint.
• 04:20 Now only templates built into PowerPoint
• 04:23 by Microsoft currently support this feature.
• 04:25 And I understand that it will continue improving,
• 04:28 it's certainly much better than it was years ago.
• 04:30 So using themes and variants allows us to update the whole style of our presentation
• 04:34 quickly, and it just works.
• 04:36 It's very clear and readable, and easily able to be seen by our audience.
• 04:41 So themes are well worth exploring and using within PowerPoint.
• 04:45 And it doesn't mean you will never need a graphic designer,
• 04:47 but there's an awesome amount of work that you can do in PowerPoint all by yourself.
• 04:51 And when it gets to the screen or print it'll just work.
• 04:54 Remember also that there are many themes and
• 04:56 templates that you can access from within PowerPoint off the Internet.

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