Applying a Theme

As you learned in "Understanding Layouts and Themes" at the beginning of this chapter, themes are the PowerPoint 2007 way of applying different designs to the presentation. A theme includes a background graphic (usually), color and font choices, and graphic effect settings. A theme can also include custom layouts, although these are not available when you apply the theme to an existing presentation. (More on that quandary later in the chapter.)

The method for applying a theme depends on whether that theme is already available in the current presentation or not. Some themes are built into PowerPoint so that they are always available; other themes are available only when you use certain templates, or when you specifically apply them from an external file. The following sections explain each of those possibilities.

Note 

Themes, also called design themes, contain a combination of colors, fonts, effects, backgrounds, and layouts. There are also more specialized themes: color themes, font themes, and effect themes. When this book uses the term "theme" alone, it's referring to a design theme. Where there is potential for confusion, the book calls it a design theme to help differentiate it from the lesser types of themes.

Applying a Theme from the Gallery

A gallery in PowerPoint is a menu of samples from which you can choose. The Themes gallery is a menu of all of the built-in themes plus any additional themes available from the current template or presentation file.

To select a theme from the gallery, follow these steps:

1. (Optional) If you want to affect only certain slides, select them. (Slide Sorter view works well for this.)

2. On the Design tab, in the Themes group, if the theme you want appears, click it, and skip the rest of these steps. If the theme you want does not appear, you will need to open the gallery. To do so, click the down arrow with the line over it, as shown in Figure 5.4.

   
   Figure 5.4: Open the Themes gallery by clicking the down arrow with the line above it.

   The Themes gallery opens, as you see in Figure 5.5. The gallery is divided into sections based upon the source of the theme. Themes stored in the current presentation appear at the top; custom themes you have added appear next. Built-in themes appear at the bottom.

   
   Figure 5.5: Select the desired theme from the menu.

   EXPERT TIP 

   You can drag the bottom-right corner of the menu to resize the gallery. To filter the gallery so that only a certain category of theme appears, click the down arrow to the right of All Themes at the top and select a category from the menu that appears.

3. Click the theme you want to apply.

   • If you selected multiple slides in step 1, the theme is applied only to them.

   • If you selected a single slide in step 1, the theme is applied to the entire presentation.

EXPERT TIP 

To override the default behavior in step 3, so that you can apply a different theme to a single slide, right-click instead of clicking in step 3 and choose Apply to Selected Slide(s) from the shortcut menu.

Applying a Theme from a Theme or Template File

You can open and use externally saved theme files in any Office application. This makes it possible to share color, font, and other settings between applications to create consistency between documents of various types. You can also save and load themes from templates.

CROSS-REF 

To create your own theme files, see "Creating a New Theme" later in this chapter.

To apply a theme to the presentation from a theme or template file, follow these steps:

1. On the Design tab, open the Themes gallery (see Figure 5.5) and click Browse for Themes. The Choose Theme or Themed Document dialog box opens.

2. Navigate to the folder containing the file and select it.

3. Click Apply.

Note 

Any custom themes you might have previously saved are located by default in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes (in Windows Vista) or C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\ Document Themes (in Windows XP). However, you don't need to navigate to that location to open a theme file because all themes stored here are automatically included in the gallery already.

A theme file contains only one theme, but a template file can potentially contain multiple themes. So how does PowerPoint know which one you want to apply if you apply from a template? If the template file contains any slides, the theme that the first slide uses is applied. Otherwise the first theme in the template (as determined by the order in Slide Master view) is applied.

Applying a Theme to a New Presentation

Applying a theme from a theme or template file to an existing presentation, as in the preceding section, applies only the formatting; it does not copy any custom slide layouts you might have created. To copy the custom layouts, you must start a new presentation based on the theme.

To start a new presentation based on the theme, follow these steps:

1. Choose Office Open. The Open dialog box appears.

2. Open the File Type list and choose Office Themes.

3. Navigate to the location containing the theme and select it. Custom themes are stored by default in C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes for Windows Vista or C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes for Windows XP.

4. Click Open. PowerPoint starts a new presentation based on that theme and any custom layouts that the theme includes.

Note 

To copy a theme from one presentation to another-including all its custom layouts, if any-see the section "Managing Themes" later in this chapter.