Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Quickly change the colors, fonts, effects or design of your entire presentation in almost a single mouse click.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ PowerPoint presentations from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Changing Themes and Colors.pptx866 KB Changing Themes and Colors - Complete.pptx
233.5 KB
Quick reference
Topic
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 Colors menu button to apply a built-in color scheme.
- Click the Font menu button to apply a built-in font scheme to the presentation.
- Click the Effects menu button `to apply a built-in effects scheme to the presentation.
- Click the Background Styles menu button background styles for the presentation.
Also note:
The four Background Styles located at the top of the Background Styles group derive their color from the top four theme color entries in the Create New Theme 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.
Login to download- 00:04 Even if you’re really good at presentation design it can take so much time to do and if you’re in a hurry it’s often best to use whatever design
- 00:10 features you can extract out of PowerPoint. I think that many people don’t realise that PowerPoint itself is both a good graphic design
- 00:16 program, as well as contains lots of templates and features that allow various elements in the presentation, such as graphics, color and
- 00:23 objects to be very well balanced. In this video we’re going to look at themes in PowerPoint to apply formatting to various parts of the
- 00:30 presentation in a way that will help us understand how these themes work. On the deign tab we can see the preview thumbnails of
- 00:38 various themes, and notice as I move my mouse over the thumbnails our active slide updates on the fly, and shows us how the changes will
- 00:45 affect the slide. At this point of time, no changes actually have been made. If we click on a particular theme, we can apply that theme to our
- 00:52 current presentation and that immediately updates our whole presentation in terms of background graphics, effects fonts, and possibly
- 01:00 even the capitalization of lines and text within placeholders, if that setting has been enabled, as well as the colors so let’s do some work. The
- 01:08 little instructions that we have here ask us to apply the thatch theme. So dropping down the little more button, this is thatch, click and we
- 01:17 notice that the whole presentation is immediately updated. We have the options of changing colors, the various fonts, the effects
- 01:24 that would be applied to shapes within the presentation, as well as the background styles. So in our instructions here, we’re asked to
- 01:31 change the colours to apex, and moving across, here it is. Now while we’re in this particular areas, we’ll explore colors a little bit further. As
- 01:40 we update the colours, we effectively update our whole presentation through the applied theme, so we click on the create new theme colors
- 01:47 menu item, and a dialog box pops up that shows us the colors within that particular theme, the contrast between a light and dark
- 01:55 background and a light and dark text, and various accents and so on. We notice that the results are expressed in the thumbnail preview,
- 02:03 including the bars of our charts, and we can save this as we wish our just reset it; I would suggest you need to be a fairly adept graphic
- 02:10 designer before mucking with settings here. But notice particularly these top four colors of the light dark text and backgrounds; these are
- 02:19 exactly the same as the top, that is the light and dark background styles, in the background styles gallery that we will look at later on, so
- 02:27 this is where they derive from. We’ve also been asked to change our presentation to Calibri fonts. Notice as I move my mouse over these
- 02:34 various selections, the fonts change on our the preview of our slide. Notice, also, that there are two fonts available in each font theme. The
- 02:42 topmost font is used for titles and the other font is used for everything else. So if you select a font theme that has the same top font and
- 02:50 bottom, that will be consistently reflected throughout the presentation in all text. So we apply the font and our presentation changes
- 02:58 entirely. We can check that the font has been applied by going to the home tab and checking the font listed. We’ve also been asked to
- 03:06 change the effects to apex, now I’ll move this little drop down menu area up a little bit so that we can see what’s going on. Notice also that
- 03:15 the shapes on the slide change their format as I move my mouse over the thumbnails. I select apex and the presentation is updated. Finally,
- 03:23 we’ve been asked to apply a background style, so the background styles affect the background of our slide, and if we go to a very dark
- 03:30 background, the text is still visible, and if we go to a very light background the text is still visible, so remember again how these derive from those
- 03:38 settings in that color dialog box, we select style 7 and apply it and the presentation is updated. So using themes allows us to update the whole
- 03:47 style of our presentation quickly and it just works; it’s very clear and readable and easily able to be seen by our audience. So themes are
- 03:56 well worth exploring and using within PowerPoint and it doesn’t mean you will never need a graphic designer, but there’s an awesome
- 04:02 amount of work that you can do in PowerPoint all by yourself and when it gets to the screen or print you know it will work. Remember also, that
- 04:10 there are many themes and templates that you can access from within PowerPoint off the internet.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.