Changing Slide Backgrounds

When you first start working on a slide show, you usually select a design, which includes a background and coordinated colors and fonts. However, as you prepare the slide show for presentation, you need to assess whether the design and the colors are right. Are you presenting to alumni, and did you mistakenly use background colors that match a rival school's team colors? Are the colors too dark for an already darkened room? Perhaps when you check out the room, you see that the furnishings clash with the colors you've chosen. Or maybe your sense of aesthetics just tells you a change is in order.

You can change the slide show design layer by clicking the Design button on the Formatting toolbar and selecting a new design from the Slide Design task pane. This is a rather drastic step, however, because a change in design also means a change in fonts, default layouts, and color schemes. After you make a design change, you must go through the slide show, one slide at a time, to make sure text fits, that images are positioned properly relative to the background design, and that the change in colors doesn't make anything more difficult to see.

There are several less dramatic changes you can make to slide backgrounds, all of which are easily reversible by using Undo. The first, and easiest, is to simply change the color scheme, leaving the design and slide layouts intact. For example, say you've used the Competition design to convey the idea of racing toward a goal, but the default orange color scheme is just too strong and garish for your taste. To change the color scheme after you've created a slide show using this design, follow these steps:

1. If you're changing a single slide, select that slide. Otherwise, it doesn't matter which slide you're on.

2. Click the Design button on the Formatting toolbar to display the Slide Design task pane.

3. Click Color Schemes at the top of the task pane. PowerPoint displays several color scheme options (see Figure 13.8).

   Figure 13.8. Each design has several additional color schemes associated with it.

   

4. Click a color scheme if you want to apply the scheme to all slides, or click the drop-down list box at the right of the scheme and choose Apply to Selected Slides to change just one slide.

PowerPoint automatically changes all automatically colored elements of the slide, including the background, text fonts, filled AutoShapes, and even action buttons.

PowerPoint is pretty good at coordinating colors in its various color schemes. Once in a while, however, one color or another just doesn't seem right. If you've got a good sense of color and want to fine-tune an existing scheme or even create your own color scheme, you can do so from the Color Scheme task pane. For now, however, take time to get used to using PowerPoint's predefined schemes. Down the road, you might want to experiment on your own.

Two other changes you can make to the background include changing the background color and omitting the background design. Neither of these changes, however, coordinates with any of the other slide elements. Changing the background color by itself might produce some interesting but unexpected results.

To change just the slide's background, follow these steps:

1. Choose Format, Background or right-click the slide and choose Background. PowerPoint displays the Background dialog box (see Figure 13.9).

   Figure 13.9. You can leave the design alone but change only a slide's background.

   

2. To remove background graphics, such as a track runner and track, check the Omit Background Graphics from Master check box.

3. To change the background color, click the drop-down list box beneath the preview in the Background Fill group box (see Figure 13.10). Choose an automatic color, select More Colors for a complete palette of colors, or select Fill Effects to select a gradient shading, pattern, texture, or image background.

   Figure 13.10. You can change a background's color, shading, pattern, texture, or image.

   

4. Click Preview to check out the change first, click Apply to apply the change to the current slide, or click Apply to All to apply the background to all the slides in the slide show.

What you have learned in this section gives you enough information to get yourself in trouble! Be judicious in changing color schemes and backgrounds. You'll probably be able to go a long time without having to change PowerPoint's predefined designs and color schemes. But you can also impress PowerPoint-jaded audiences with new and different backgrounds and colors, all the while creating an effective presentation.

For more information on how to choose colors that coordinate properly, see p. 394.