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, 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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