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.pptx850.6 KB Changing Themes and Colors - Complete.pptx
207.1 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 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.
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, colors and
- 00:25 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 our
- 00:31 presentation in a way that will help us understand how these themes work. On the deign tab we can see the preview thumbnails of
- 00:39 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
- 00:47 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
- 00:54 current presentation and that immediately updates our whole presentation in terms of background graphics, effects, fonts, and
- 01:02 possibly even the capitalization of lines of text within placeholders, if that setting has been enabled, as well as the colors. So let’s do some
- 01:10 work. The little instructions that we have here ask us to apply the facet theme. So dropping down the little more button, this is facet, click
- 01:21 and we notice that the whole presentation is immediately updated. We’ve also been asked to change the variant and variants are subsets
- 01:29 within that particular theme. We have in this instance a green, blue, pink, and a very dark one. So we will select the blue variant and it’s
- 01:39 applied to the whole presentation. Within variants we have the options of changing colors, the various fonts, the effects that would be
- 01:46 applied to shapes within the presentation, as well as the background style. So in our instructions we are asked to change the colours
- 01:54 to green yellow, and moving across, here it is. Now while we’re in this particular areas, we will explore colors a little bit further. As we update
- 02:02 the colors, we effectively update our whole presentation through the applied theme. We click the customize colors menu item and a
- 02:11 dialog box pops up and shows us the colors within that particular variation, the contrast between a light and dark background and a light
- 02:20 and dark text, and various accents and so on. We notice that the results are expressed in the thumbnail preview, including the bars of our
- 02:28 charts, and we could save this as we wish or just reset it; I would suggest that you need to be fairly adept at graphic design before mucking
- 02:36 with the settings here. But notice particularly these top four colors of the light dark text and backgrounds; these are exactly the same as the
- 02:45 top, which is the light and dark background styles, in the background styles gallery that we will look at later on; so this is where they derive
- 02:52 from. We’ve also been asked to change our presentation to Calibri fonts. Notice that as I move over these various selections the fonts
- 03:00 change on the preview of our slide. Notice, also, that there are two fonts available in each font theme. The topmost font is used for titles and
- 03:11 the other font is used for everything else. So if you select a font theme that has the same top and bottom that will be reflected consistently
- 03:19 throughout your presentation in all text. So we apply the font and our entire presentation changes. We can check that font has been
- 03:27 applied by going to the home tab and checking the font listed. We’ve been asked to also change the effects to an extreme shadow.
- 03:35 Notice that the shapes on the slide change their format as I move my mouse over the thumbnails. I select extreme shadow and the presentation is
- 03:44 updated. Finally, we’ve been asked to apply a background style, so the background styles affects the background of our slide, and if we go
- 03:52 to a very dark 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
- 04:00 derive from those settings in the color dialog box, we select style 7 and apply it and the presentation is updated. So using themes and
- 04:09 variants allows us to update the whole style of our presentation quickly and it just works; it’s very clear and readable and easily able to be
- 04:18 seen by our audience. So themes are well worth exploring and using within PowerPoint and it doesn’t mean you will never need a graphic
- 04:25 designer, but there’s an awesome amount of work that you can do in PowerPoint all by yourself and when it gets to the screen or print it
- 04:32 will work. Remember also, that there are many themes and templates that you can access from within PowerPoint off the internet.
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