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 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.

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