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About this lesson
Quickly change the colors, fonts, effects or design of your entire presentation in almost a single mouse click.
Lesson versions
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Changing Themes and Colors.pptx200.3 KB Changing Themes and Colors - Solution.pptx
222.8 KB
Quick reference
Changing Themes and Colors
Applying a theme to a presentation, and colors, fonts, effects and background styles.
When to use
To format the color and design of an entire presentation quickly.
Instructions
- On the Design tab, click a theme in the Themes gallery to apply that theme.
- Click the More button in the Variants gallery, and then click the Colors menu button to apply a built-in color scheme.
- Click the More button in the Variants Gallery, and then click the Font menu button to apply a built-in font scheme to the presentation.
- Click the More button in the Variants Gallery, and then click the Effects menu button to apply a built-in effects scheme to the presentation.
- Click the Format Background to change the background styles for the presentation.
Also note:
The four Background Styles located at the top of the Background Styles gallery derive their color from the top four theme color entries in the Customize Colors dialog box.
There are two entries of fonts in a built-in fonts scheme. The top entry will apply that font to titles and the bottom entry will apply that font to the rest of the presentation. If you wish to apply the same font throughout the presentation, you must select a scheme that has the same font listed twice.
Office 365 Subscription- PowerPoint Designer
PowerPoint Designer generates slide design ideas to change the look of your slides.
Instructions
- Select the slide you wish to add a picture to.
- On the Insert tab, in the Images group, click Pictures, and browse to the location of the picture in the Insert Picture dialog box, select the picture, and then click either:
- Insert to insert the picture directly, or
- The Insert drop-down arrow and select Link to File. Make sure that if you link to file you distribute the pictures with the presentation.
- On the Design tab, click the Design ideas button in the Designer group.
- If prompted to try Design Ideas, click Let’s Go.
- PowerPoint will automatically load Design Ideas in the Design Ideas Task Pane.
- Click the thumbnail of a design to apply it to the current slide.
Troubleshooting
- You must be connected to the internet for Design Ideas to work as content is generated from online.
- Use only photo in .jpg, .png, .gif, or .bmp format per slide.
- Use photos larger than 200 x 200 pixels in size.
- Use a theme that comes with PowerPoint and not one you downloaded from elsewhere or that you customized.
- Make sure you slide contains a Title or Title plus Content Placeholder.
- Don’t add any additional objects or shapes to the slide.
- Click File, Options, and the General tab to turn Designer on or off.
- 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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