11. Dissecting Themes
In This Chapter
- Making Unique and Beautiful Presentations
- Example of Using a Theme
- Different Types of Theme Files
- Core Parts of an Office Theme
- Creating a Theme
Themes are essential tools used to create visually stunning PowerPoint presentations. In PowerPoint 2007, themes are a completely new beast from what you’ve been used to in the past.
We start with some simple exercises to familiarize you with using themes. Then, in the second half of this chapter, we dig deep and teach you more than you ever wanted know about themes.
We can’t teach you aesthetics or good taste in this chapter, but we will arm you with tools that can help you make even the ugliest presentation just a little nicer.
Making Unique and Beautiful Presentations
People have complained about how PowerPoint looks for nearly a decade. In this section, we discuss how to use PowerPoint 2007’s new themes to quickly make your presentations look stunning, yet unique.
Your Presentation Shouldn’t Look Like You Stole It
The main complaint people have had for years is that most PowerPoint presentations look the same. Previous versions of PowerPoint shipped with a decent number of design templates, but the problem was they got dated rather quickly. After a few months of looking at various PowerPoint presentations, you had pretty much seen every design template in existence unless you devoted significant time searching for templates. If you deviated from canned design templates, you were on your own, which usually meant that your presentation wouldn’t be as pretty unless you were a great artist and could create your own beautiful templates.
The new 2007 themes make it easy for non-artists to pick and choose parts from various designs and incorporate them into their presentations. This gives many more design combinations than PowerPoint 2003, which only let you use the entire design template or none of it. It also becomes easy to use professionally designed designs while customizing small portions of your presentation, so you aren’t stuck trying to be a designer. Speaking of designers, the responsibility of matching colors, creating backgrounds, and positioning data in the themes was left for a set of professional designers who were hired by Microsoft.
Note
Old-timers might remember the AutoContent Wizard that existed in previous versions of PowerPoint. It walked you through a few steps and churned out a styled presentation for you at the end. The new Office themes replace the AutoContent Wizard and address its one major shortcoming: Most AutoContent Wizard presentations look very similar to one another.
It’s Easy to Change Your Presentation’s Look
Applying themes in PowerPoint 2007 is easier than ever. Microsoft hired designers to create some styles that are coordinated and look great. Even if you can’t match your socks with your belt, you can find some great default themes to apply to your vanilla presentation so that you can automatically transform it into a great looking work of art. Applying a theme and making a few customizations requires just a few quick clicks.
Themes Across Office
One major difference between design templates in PowerPoint 2003 and the new Office themes is that 2007 themes can be used in Word, Excel, and Outlook emails, in addition to PowerPoint. Themes are applied to shapes, text, tables, diagrams, charts, slide layouts, and much more.
This is great if you have a company logo or color theme because you can create a theme to stylistically coordinate your spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and emails.
Example of Using a Theme
Let’s walk through a quick example of using a theme in PowerPoint.
Apply an Entire Theme
We start by changing the entire presentation theme:
1. Start PowerPoint with a blank presentation.
2. Click the Design tab.
3. To the right of the gallery in the Themes section, click the bottom of the three buttons to expand the gallery.
4. Hover over different themes in the gallery (see Figure 11.1) and watch the presentation change. When you see one you like, click the theme to change your presentation. You can also use a theme you got off the Internet or one you created by choosing Browse for Themes at the bottom of the Themes gallery.
Figure 11.1 The Themes gallery expanded.
5. Now type some text into the title placeholder, and then select part of it.
6. Go to the Format tab. In the WordArt Styles group, click Text Fill (the top of the three drop-downs on the right side). Choose one of the Theme Colors in the top portion. Note that the color choices you’re given here are specific to the theme you chose earlier, so unless you try really hard to make it ugly, it probably won’t look horrible.
7. Go to the Format tab’s Shapes Styles group and choose a pretty shape style from the gallery. Now you have a colored text box with some colored text. What we have is in Figure 11.2; your results will vary depending on the theme and colors you’ve chosen.
Figure 11.2 An example of some theme choices made to text and shapes after applying the Opulent theme. Compare this with Figure 11.3.
8. Finally, let’s change themes again. On the Design tab, go to Themes and change the theme to your second favorite in the gallery. Everything changes—including the color and effect customization you made, which is still slightly different from the other shapes in this presentation—but everything looks good because the style comes from this new theme. Compare the result (ours is seen in Figure 11.3) with what you had before (ours is shown in Figure 11.2) and see how easy it was to change the layouts and the colors with a couple of clicks.
Figure 11.3 The result of changing the design theme to Metro. After one click, you have a different text box color and text color, and the layout is different.
This example shows how you can make very specific changes to your presentations that still follow the theme. This ensures that these customizations look good and update appropriately after you change themes. You can easily make changes to text fills, lines, effects and shape fills, lines, and effects in the same way, resulting in aesthetically pleasing and good looking objects that all follow the theme.
Caution
Despite PowerPoint 2007 making style choices easier, you can still occasionally create something visually displeasing, whether on purpose or by accident. For example, if the text color you chose happens to be the same as your chosen shape background color, it’s possible that the text will disappear. Or, you might end up with some color choices that simply don’t look great together. Don’t be disheartened; just apply different colors or themes until you create something you like.
Apply Different Parts of Themes
We’ve now played with changing the theme of the entire presentation. What if we like part of one theme and part of another theme?
Whereas PowerPoint 2003 had one monolithic theme concept called a design template, PowerPoint 2007 splits themes into five different components that you can use independently:
- Color scheme—Used by Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007
- Font scheme—Used by Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007
- Effect scheme—Used by Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007
- Slide masters—Used by PowerPoint 2007
- Slide layouts—Used by PowerPoint 2007
Let’s say that we’re happy with the fonts and effects in our current presentation, but we want to use a different set of colors. That’s easy enough to accomplish:
1. Go to the Design tab, Themes group and click the arrow to open the gallery. Choose a theme from the gallery that is appropriate for your presentation.
2. Back on the Design tab, go to the Themes group. This time, click the Colors button and choose a different set of colors that go with your chosen theme.
Now you’re using colors from one theme and everything else from another theme. PowerPoint comes with 20 or so themes. By mixing and matching fonts, colors, and effects, you get a lot of combinations. This number doesn’t even include background styles, which we discuss later in the chapter.
Different Types of Theme Files
Themes, effect schemes, font schemes, color schemes, presentations, and templates can all be pretty overwhelming. What’s the difference between all of these? We explain it all in this section.
Theme Versus Effect Scheme Versus Font Scheme Versus Color Scheme
In the previous section, we showed everything inside a theme. The core parts are an effect scheme, a font scheme, and a color scheme. In addition to being inside a theme .thmx file, each of these three schemes also have their own file format (see Table 11.1).
Table 11.1 There Are Many Types of Theme Files
In the previous section, we discussed how to choose from a list of schemes and change your color scheme. When Office is displaying this list of color schemes, it isn’t actually looking through your list of themes and parsing out the color information. It just looks through the color scheme .xml files that came with Office and shows colors from those.
Note
The effect, font, and color schemes that come with Office 2007 can be found in x:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeDocument Themes 12. When you create your own as described in the previous section—such as a custom color scheme—they are saved in x:UsersBillGatesAppDataRoamingMicrosoftTemplatesDocument Themes on Windows Vista or x:Documents and SettingsBillGatesApplication DataMicrosoftTemplatesDocument Themes on Windows XP.
What’s more confusing is that these color schemes mostly have the same name as themes. For example, one of the themes that comes with Office is Apex. When you buy Office 2007, you get Apex.thmx, which is applied when you click on the Apex theme using the Themes gallery on the Design tab. It also changes the color, font, and effect schemes in your presentation to the ones stored inside Apex.thmx.
But, let’s say that you want to apply a custom font scheme using the Fonts drop-down on the Design tab in the Themes group. Now you’re looking at the list of font schemes, which are .xml files. If you choose Metro as your font scheme, it pulls the fonts from Metro.xml, not from Metro.thmx. Metro.thmx and the Metro theme aren’t involved at all. It works similarly when you apply a color or effect scheme; these won’t involve the theme file but just the respective color scheme (.xml) or effect scheme files (.eftx).
Theme Versus Presentation Versus Template
Now that you have schemes and themes straight, how do these relate to presentations (.pptx) and template (.potx) files? This is more confusing since themes replace templates, which were the primary way of styling your document in previous versions of PowerPoint:
- Themes (
.thmx) are standalone files shared across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007. We’ve explained all the gory details of themes in the previous few sections of this chapter. They contain an effect scheme, a font scheme, a color scheme, and PowerPoint layouts and masters. - Presentations (
.pptx,.pptm) contain slides, masters, formatting, and all the core parts you’d expect in a presentation. They also contain style information copied from a theme, including theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects. Remember, you can mix and match so that a slide in a presentation might contain a background from one theme, theme colors from a second theme, and theme fonts from yet another theme. And one shape in the same presentation can glow from a different effect scheme from a completely different theme. - Templates (
.potx, .potm) were more like themes in previous versions of PowerPoint, but in PowerPoint 2007, they’re essentially just an example presentation and contain everything you’d find inside a presentation file.
Core Parts of an Office Theme
Now that we’ve talked about using themes, this section goes more in depth about what’s in a theme that so you have a better understanding of how themes work.
Themes are intentionally designed to contain a small amount of abstract style information. This is for two reasons:
- Content reuse—Originally, the designers of Office themes tried to be specific, embedding specific font sizes, for instance. This doesn’t work well across applications though because PowerPoint’s font sizes are generally much larger than Word’s. By staying abstract, the theme can be applied to mean something slightly different in each Office application.
- More theme-based choices—Many visual styles can be derived from each theme. For example, a theme contains only a handful of text colors, but the application can derive a slew of them from that core set. This is very important because although it’s good that you can ignore the theme entirely and set your own custom colors, PowerPoint wants you to follow something derived from the theme whenever possible so that your changes are restyled if the theme changes. So, you have a lot of colors to choose from—many more than were stored in the actual theme—yet all of them are ultimately theme colors.
Let’s look at everything that’s physically inside a .thmx theme file.
Note
If you’re a techie and want to follow along, a .thmx file is similar to other Office 2007 files such as a .pptx file. Take your favorite .thmx file and rename it to .zip—for example, take Apex.thmx and rename it Apex.zip. Then, you can use Windows Explorer, WinZip, or another Zip program to take a closer look at what’s inside (as shown in Figure 11.4). Most of what’s discussed here is found inside the theme1.xml file.
Figure 11.4 A listing of files inside a theme using Windows Explorer in Vista.
Font Scheme
Part of a theme is the Font Scheme. Let’s take a look at what this actually is.
Note
The PowerPoint user interface calls these Theme Font, Theme Color, and Theme Effect. The file format calls them Font Scheme, Color Scheme, and Effect Scheme. We use them somewhat interchangeably in this section of the book, but don’t be confused: The names are completely synonymous.
A theme contains two fonts:
- Major font—Used mostly for headers
- Minor font—Used mostly for body text
These two fonts can different or the same. The default Office theme sets both to Calibri.
In comparison, PowerPoint 2003 design templates could specify fonts for placeholders by setting fonts on the master. But, text boxes and shapes that weren’t based on master objects could never change fonts based on the template. It was up to individual users to make sure that they looked good and to manually change them after changing design templates.
Note
In reality, many more than two fonts are stored because each theme that ships with Office contains one major font and one minor font for each locale/language that Office ships in.
Using a Theme Font
Let’s see these in action:
1. Start a new presentation.
2. Type some text into a placeholder and select it.
3. Drop down the font selector on the Home tab, Font group (see Figure 11.5). Notice how the first two choices are listed under Theme Fonts. If you set the font as one of these, your text automatically changes fonts if you change themes or font schemes.
Figure 11.5 Display available fonts. Notice how the first two choices are theme fonts.
Tip
Changing theme fonts can seriously change the layout of text you’ve carefully positioned throughout your presentation. For most presentations, you should feel free to experiment by applying different font themes. But, if text layout is extremely important to you, your best bet is to apply a theme or a theme font before adding a whole bunch of text to your presentation. Learn more about font schemes and new Office 2007 fonts in Chapter 2, “Everything You Need to Know About Text.”
Changing and Adding Font Schemes
To change a font scheme, go to the Design tab, Themes group and click the Fonts drop-down. Choose from the list of font schemes that come with Office (see Figure 11.6).
Figure 11.6 Choose from a list of font schemes.
You can add your own font schemes to the list by going to the Design tab, Themes group, clicking the Fonts drop-down, and choosing Create New Theme Fonts (seen at the bottom of Figure 11.6). In the dialog (Figure 11.7), you can specify the two fonts, give it a name, and then it’s added to the list whenever you use Office.
Figure 11.7 Dialog to create new theme fonts.
Color Scheme
A theme contains 12 different colors:
- Four colors are for text and backgrounds. There are two light colors and two dark ones, and Office’s design guidelines say that the two dark colors must each be visible on the two light backgrounds, and vice versa.
- Six are accent colors. The design guidelines say that they must be visible when placed on top of the previous four colors.
- Two of the colors are for the hyperlink and followed hyperlink colors.
Some additional notes about using color are
- Each color may be a simple RGB (for example, 30% red, 30% green, and 40% blue) or named color (for example, I want it to be “magenta”), but PowerPoint supports more exotic options such as a reference to a system color, like the current window text color. Colors that aren’t RGB or names can’t be set inside PowerPoint, and theme makers have to set them by manually editing the theme in XML.
- PowerPoint 2003 design templates each contained a smaller set of eight colors that worked just for that template. It had one color each for background, text, shadow, title text, fills, accent, hyperlink, and followed hyperlink. Because 2007 themes need to work in Word and Excel, the eight colors weren’t enough since Word documents and Excel spreadsheets nearly always have white backgrounds, and colors that looked good on the theme background color wouldn’t necessarily look good on white. So, in addition to carrying over the main color scheme colors from PowerPoint 2003 to 2007, each PowerPoint 2007 theme contains more colors that are guaranteed to work on dark backgrounds and some that work on light backgrounds.
To apply a Theme Color, do the following:
1. Start a new presentation.
2. Select one of the placeholders.
3. Go to the Home tab, Drawing group and choose Shape Fill (see Figure 11.8) to view the Office color picker.
Figure 11.8 The Office color picker.
Of the theme colors, notice how there are 10 columns, corresponding to the 10 colors in the color scheme. Below each of the 10 colors are subtle tints of the color that Office derives automatically from each scheme color.
Scheme colors are also subtly woven into other formatting menus. For example, if you use the shape gallery (select a shape and then go to Format tab, Shape Styles group and choose from the gallery on the left) or apply an effect like a glow (on the Format tab, Shape Styles group, choose Shape Effects and then Glow), these change your shape to use a scheme color.
Change color schemes by going to the Design tab, Themes group and click the Colors button. Choose from the list of color schemes that come with Office (see Figure 11.9).
Figure 11.9 Choose from the list of Office color schemes.
Again, you can add your own color scheme by going to the Design tab, Themes group, clicking the Colors button, and choosing Create New Theme Colors (shown at the bottom of Figure 11.9). In the dialog (Figure 11.10), choose a color for each of the 12 scheme colors, give it a name, and save it for future use throughout Microsoft Office.
Figure 11.10 Dialog used to create new theme colors.
Effect Scheme
Finally, the effect scheme is part of a theme that determines which fill, line, effect, and backgrounds are used.
An effect scheme contains four sets of three items each:
- Fill styles
- Line styles
- Effect styles (shadow, 3D, glow, blur, and so on)
- Background fill styles
There are three variations for each component here, one for
- A subtle variation
- A moderate variation
- An intense variation
Any of the styles might contain references to an image—in which case, the image file would be stored inside the effect scheme. For example, a theme might have a picture fill of a sunset as one of the three fill styles. In that situation, the picture of the sunset would be stored in the effect scheme.
Using a Theme Effect
Effect schemes are used to create many of the PowerPoint galleries that let you quickly change the look of text or shapes:
1. Start a new presentation.
2. Select one of the placeholders.
3. Go to the Format tab. In the Shape Styles group, click the bottom arrow to the right of the gallery (see Figure 11.11).
Figure 11.11 View 49 styles you can quickly apply in the Shape Styles gallery.
Note how there are 7 columns and 7 rows, providing 49 options altogether. These 49 options aren’t stored in the theme. Rather, Office generates these automatically from the abstract color and effect scheme information:
- The seven columns come from seven different scheme colors. Note how the text colors look good on the fill colors because of the color rules mentioned earlier.
- The seven rows come from combining the subtle, moderator, and intense variations of fill, line, and effect styles with each other.
Changing or Adding a Effect Scheme
As with the color or font scheme, changing effect schemes is as easy as going to the Design tab, Themes group and clicking Effects, and then choosing from the list (see Figure 11.12).
Figure 11.12 Choose from the list of Office effect schemes.
Note
Ready to add your own effect scheme? Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it was with colors and fonts. PowerPoint doesn’t provide a user interface for creating an effect scheme, so you have to edit the theme file directly, which is beyond the scope of this book. We’re sure that someone will eventually write a tool to make this easier.
Object Defaults and Extra Color Schema List
The theme can contain information that specifies what style new shapes take on and provides some space to store extra color schema used by other Office applications. Themes that ship with Office don’t specify values for either of these, so just ignore them.
Thumbnails
The theme contains a few canned thumbnails, which are used to display a preview of your theme viewed from the Windows Explorer or from the Office Themes gallery. You can edit these with any image editor, and you will see the changes when you preview the theme in Explorer or Office.
- Shell—thumbnail.jpeg is used to show a quick preview of the theme in Windows Explorer. When you select a theme in Windows, this will be displayed in the preview box.
- Gallery—themeThumbnail.jpeg and auxiliaryThemeThumbnail.jpeg are used to preview the theme in the Office gallery. It’s essentially the little square icon that appears when you view a theme in the Office Themes gallery.
Slide Layouts and Masters
Finally, themes contain PowerPoint slide layouts and slide masters. That’s why when you switch themes, the layout of your slides changes too:
- A slide layout contains a definition for a slide. This includes the positions of every shape and placeholder that appears on the slide, along with the formatting of each of these objects, such as colors, effects, and fonts.
- A slide master merely has a list of layouts associated with that master, and any additional shapes that the theme authors want to appear on every layout associated with that master.
We don’t want to rehash layouts and masters here, so for a refresher, read Chapter 10, “Formatting Your Presentation,” where we discuss creating custom layouts.
That’s it. You now know everything inside a theme.
Previous versions of PowerPoint had animation schemes—animations that were supposed to look good with a particular presentation. Animation schemes no longer exist and are not part of PowerPoint 2007 themes.
Creating a Theme
We’ve explained in previous sections how to make your own quick-and-dirty color and font schemes. Real PowerPoint power users make entire themes though, so let’s construct a quickie:
Note
If you’re a professional Office theme maker, these instructions aren’t for you. The Office user interface only exposes a small fraction of the customizability available in the file format and to create the best themes—comparable to the themes that come with Office—you need to learn to learn XML and the file formats to edit a .thmx file directly.
1. Start with a blank presentation.
2. Add some master slides, a notes master, a handout master, and a title master. Chapter 10 details how to do this. Don’t forget to add some special bullets, a header and footer, and maybe even some annoying animation sounds to your master slides.
3. Create a custom color and font scheme and select them (on the Design tab, Themes group, choose Color or choose Font). You can’t create a custom effect scheme or background style using the PowerPoint user interface, but you can select an existing one to use for your theme by going to the Design tab, Background group and choosing Background Style or to the Themes group and click Effects).
4. Save your creation by going to the Design tab, Themes group, dropping down the gallery, and choosing Save Current Theme at the bottom (see Figure 11.13).
Figure 11.13 Choose the Save Current Theme option to save the current styles as an Office theme.
To use your theme, open a blank presentation or a presentation you want to restyle. Go the same place under the Design tab, Themes group, open the gallery, but instead choose Browse for Themes. (You can see it in Figure 11.13 above Save Current Theme.) Then find the theme you saved on disk and apply it. If you really like your theme and want it to appear in the gallery for everyone using your computer, you can add it to the built-in list at x:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeDocument Themes 12, assuming that your IT administrator has given you permission to do so.