New Design Choices and Tools

The new design choices in Office PowerPoint 2007 make it easier than ever to create sophisticated and effective presentations. Whether you start with a predesigned template or create a new presentation from scratch, you can rely on the new themes and styles to help you communicate your message in an engaging way.

Simplify Your Design Process with Office PowerPoint 2007 Themes

If you create presentations as a regular part of your work, you might find yourself stuck in the rut of using the same four or five backgrounds for the majority of your presentations. The new themes available in the Design tab of Office PowerPoint 2007 give you additional choices and enable you to preview them quickly by simply pointing to the one you like in the Themes gallery (see Figure 6-3).

You can easily modify themes and save them to the Themes gallery for later reuse, which is helpful if you have a specific corporate color or design used in your business presentations. Simply modify the slide to fit your corporate design (or open an existing presentation with that existing theme) and click the Save Current Theme command in the bottom of the Themes gallery.

Choosing a New Color Scheme

Making color choices is difficult for many people. Knowing which colors work well together is often a hit-or-miss proposition for nondesigners. Office PowerPoint 2007 helps you take the guesswork out of color choices by providing a large palette of color groups. You can choose an existing color group—or create a new one—that overrides the existing colors in the selected theme. When you select a color theme in Office PowerPoint 2007, the selection changes the background, all tables, text, and objects to match a consistent, coordinated, and cohesive set of colors.

The Colors command is in the Themes command set in the Design tab. Click the Colors down arrow to display the gallery of choices (see Figure 6-4). Point to a new color selection to see how it will look in the presentation; when you find one you want to use, click it to apply it to the presentation.

Making Design Changes with Background Styles

Quick Styles is a feature common to all core Microsoft Office system applications, offering you different selections you can preview and then apply to your slides with a click of the mouse. The Quick Styles that are available depend on the object you select. When you are working in the Design tab, the Background Styles command provides a collection of background styles you can apply to the current slide or to all slides in your presentation.

You can make additional choices for the background of your slides by clicking the Background command in the Background Styles gallery. The Format Background dialog box that appears enables you to choose a picture or texture for the background (see Figure 6-5). You can also make changes to background colors by choosing a new color scheme.

Custom Slide Master Layouts In Office PowerPoint 2007, you can create your own slide layouts to better fit the type of information you want to present. In previous versions, creating your own layout meant modifying an existing slide layout, which sometimes added text boxes or object frames you didn’t want. (Not to mention making formatting choices you had to accommodate or undo.) Now your custom slide master layouts can include many different elements—media objects, text boxes, and more—and you insert those elements using Insert Placeholder in the Master Layout command tab of the Slide Master tab. Note The Insert Placeholder command becomes available when you select the Slide Master command in the View tab.