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 - Completed.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 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, designing can take so
- 00:07 much time to do.
- 00:07 And if you're in a hurry, it's often best to use whatever
- 00:10 design features you can extract out of PowerPoint.
- 00:13 I think that many people don't realize that PowerPoint itself is both a good
- 00:16 graphic design program, as well as contains lots of templates and
- 00:20 features that allow various elements in the presentation.
- 00:23 Such as graphics, colors, and objects to be very well balanced.
- 00:28 In this video, we're going to look at themes in PowerPoint to apply formatting
- 00:31 to various parts of our presentation.
- 00:34 In a way, that will help us to understand how these themes work.
- 00:38 On the design tab, we can see the preview thumbnails of various themes.
- 00:42 And notice as I move my mouse over the thumbnails our active slide
- 00:46 updates on the fly, and shows us how the changes will affect the slide.
- 00:51 At this point of time, no changes actually have been made.
- 00:54 If we click on a particular theme, we can apply that theme to our current
- 00:58 presentation, and that immediately updates our whole presentation in terms of
- 01:02 background graphics, effects, fonts and possibly even the capitalization
- 01:07 of lines of text within placeholders, if that setting has been enabled.
- 01:12 As well as text within placeholders, as well as colors.
- 01:17 So let's do some work.
- 01:19 The little instructions that we have here ask us to apply the Facet theme.
- 01:24 So, dropping down the little more button, this is Facet, click, and
- 01:29 we notice that the whole presentation is immediately updated.
- 01:33 We've also been asked to change the variant, and
- 01:36 variants are subsets within a particular theme.
- 01:40 So, we have in this instance a green, blue, pink, and a very dark one.
- 01:46 So, we will select the blue variant, and it's applied to the whole presentation.
- 01:52 Within variants we have the option of changing colors,
- 01:55 the various fonts, the effects that would be applied to shapes within
- 01:59 the presentation as well as the background style.
- 02:03 So, in our instructions we are asked to change the colors to green,
- 02:07 yellow and moving across here it is.
- 02:11 While we're in this particular area, we will explore colors a little bit further.
- 02:16 As we update the colors we effectively update our whole presentation through
- 02:20 the applied theme.
- 02:22 We click the customize colors menu item and a dialogue box pops up and
- 02:26 shows us the colors within that particular variation.
- 02:29 The contrast between a light and dark background and a light and
- 02:33 dark text and various accents and so on.
- 02:38 We've noticed that the results were expressed in the thumbnail
- 02:40 preview including the bars of our charts, and
- 02:44 so we can save this as we wish or just reset it.
- 02:46 I would suggest that you need to be fairly adept at Graphic Design before mucking
- 02:51 with the settings here, but
- 02:53 notice particularly these top four colors of the light, dark text and backgrounds.
- 02:58 These are exactly the same as the top, which is the light and dark
- 03:02 background styles in the background styles gallery that we will look at later on.
- 03:07 So, this is where they derive from.
- 03:11 We've also been asked to change our presentation to calibra fonts.
- 03:14 Notice as I move over these various selections,
- 03:17 the fonts change on the preview of our slide.
- 03:20 Notice also that there are two fonts available in each font theme.
- 03:25 The top most font is used for titles, and the other font is used for
- 03:28 everything else.
- 03:30 So, if you select a font theme that has the same top and bottom,
- 03:34 that will be reflected consistently throughout your presentation in all text.
- 03:38 So, we apply the font and our entire presentation changes.
- 03:42 We can check that font has been applied by going to the home tab.
- 03:45 We have been asked also to change the effects to an extreme shadow.
- 03:52 Notice that the shapes on the slide change their format as I move my mouse over
- 03:56 the thumbnails.
- 03:57 I select Extreme Shadow, and the presentation is updated.
- 04:00 Finally, we've been asked to apply a Background Style, so
- 04:04 the Background Styles affect the background of our slide.
- 04:08 And if we go to a very dark background the text is still visible, and
- 04:11 if we go to a very light background the text is still visible.
- 04:15 So, remember again how these derive form those settings in the color guide log box.
- 04:20 We select style 7 and apply in the presentation as updated.
- 04:24 Now a quick of a feature just released on the office 3 6 5 version
- 04:29 of Powerpoint 2016.
- 04:30 Let's insert a picture.
- 04:33 Insert from the library on my computer, then go back to the design tab.
- 04:38 The design ideas on the design group, again if you dont see this,
- 04:42 you dont have the Office 365 version, and we can try various design ideas
- 04:47 that have been programmed into this version of PowerPoint.
- 04:50 Now only templates built into PowerPoint by Microsoft currently support
- 04:53 this feature, and I understand the feature will improve as updates are provided for
- 04:57 the office 365 version.
- 05:00 So, using themes and variants allows us to update the whole style of our presentation
- 05:03 quickly, and adjust works.
- 05:05 It's very clear and readable, and easily able to be seen by our audience.
- 05:10 So, themes are well worth exploring and using within PowerPoint.
- 05:13 That doesn't mean you'll never need a graphic designer, but
- 05:16 there's an awesome amount of work that you can do in PowerPoint all by yourself, and
- 05:20 when it gets to the screen or print, it will work.
- 05:23 Remember also that there are many themes and
- 05:26 templates that you can access from within PowerPoint off the Internet.
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