Changing Colors, Fonts, and Effects

In addition to overall themes, which govern several types of formatting, PowerPoint also provides many built-in color, font, and effect themes that you can apply separately from your choice of overall theme. So, for example, you can apply a theme that contains a background design you like, and then change the colors and fonts for it.

In the following sections, you'll learn how to apply some of these built-in color, font, and effect settings to a presentation without changing the overall theme. Then later in the chapter you will learn how to save these customized settings as new themes and even how to create your own custom color and font settings in a theme.

Understanding Color Placeholders

To understand how PowerPoint changes colors via a theme, you must know something about how it handles color placeholders in general. PowerPoint uses a set of color placeholders for the bulk of its color formatting. Because each item's color is defined by a placeholder, and not as a fixed color, you can easily change the colors by switching to a different color theme. That way if you decide, for example, that you want all the slide titles to be blue rather than green, you make the change once and it is applied to all slides automatically.

A group of colors assigned to preset placeholders is a color theme. PowerPoint contains 20+ built-in color themes that are available regardless of the overall theme applied to the presentation. Because most design themes use placeholders to define their colors, you can apply the desired design theme to the presentation and then fine-tune the colors afterward by experimenting with the built-in color themes.

How many color placeholders are there in a color theme? There are actually 12, but sometimes not all of them are available to be applied to individual objects. When you choose a color theme (Design Colors), the gallery of themes from which you choose shows only the first 8 colors of each color theme. It doesn't matter so much here because you can't apply individual colors from there anyway. When selecting colors from a color picker (used for applying fill and border color to specific objects), as in Figure 5.6, there are 10 theme swatches. And when you define a new custom color scheme, there are 12 placeholders to set up. The final 2 are for visited and unvisited hyperlinks; these colors aren't included in a color picker.

Figure 5.6: PowerPoint uses color pickers such as this one to enable you to easily apply color placeholders to objects.

Switching Color Themes

After applying the overall theme you want, you might want to apply different colors. To switch to a different color theme, follow these steps:

1. (Optional) To apply a different color theme to a slide master other than the default one, open Slide Master view (View Slide Master) and click the desired slide master. Otherwise, the color change will apply to all slides that use the default slide master. The default slide master is the first one listed in Slide Master view.

2. On the Design tab (or the Slide Master tab if in Slide Master view), click Colors. A gallery of color themes opens.

3. (Optional) Point to a color theme and observe the preview on the slide behind the list.

4. Click the desired color theme. See Figure 5.7.

   
   Figure 5.7: Select the desired theme from the dialog box.

CROSS-REF 

You can also create custom color themes; see the section "Creating a Custom Color Theme" later in this chapter for details.

Understanding Font Placeholders

By default in most themes and templates, text box fonts are not set to a specific font, but to one of two designations: Heading or Body. Then a font theme defines what specific fonts to use. To change the fonts across the entire presentation, all you have to do is apply a different font theme.

A font theme is an XML-based specification that defines a pair of fonts: one for headings and one for body text. Then that font is applied to the text boxes in the presentation based on their statuses of Heading or Body. For example, all of the slide titles are usually set to Heading, and all of the content placeholders and manual text boxes are usually set to Body.

In a blank presentation (default blank template), when you click inside a slide title placeholder box, you see Calibri (Headings) in the Font group on the Home tab. Figure 5.8 shows that the current font is Calibri, but that it is being used only because the font theme specifies it. You could change the font theme to Verdana/Verdana, for example, and then the font designation for that box would appear as Verdana (Headings).

Figure 5.8: When some text is using a font placeholder rather than a fixed font, (Headings) or (Body) appears after its name in the Font group on the Home tab.

In some font themes, the same font is used for both headings and body. In a default blank presentation both fonts are Calibri, for example, and the Verdana/Verdana set is an additional example. In many other font themes, though, the heading and body fonts are different.

Switching Font Themes

After applying an overall theme, you might decide you want to use different fonts in the presentation. To switch to a different font theme, follow these steps:

1. (Optional) To apply a different font theme to a slide master other than the default one, open Slide Master view (View Slide Master) and click the desired slide master. Otherwise, the font change will apply to all slides that use the default slide master. The default slide master is the first one listed in Slide Master view.

2. On the Design tab (or Slide Master tab, if in Slide Master view), click Fonts. A gallery of font themes opens.

3. (Optional) Point to a font theme and observe the change on the slide behind the list.

4. Click the desired font theme. See Figure 5.9.

   
   Figure 5.9: Select the desired font theme.

Changing the Effect Theme

Effect themes apply to several types of drawings that PowerPoint can construct, including SmartArt, charts, and drawn lines and shapes. They make the surfaces of objects formatted with 3-D attributes look like different textures (more or less shiny-looking, colors more or less deep, and so on).

To change the effect theme, follow these steps:

1. On the Design tab, click Effects. A gallery of effect themes opens.

2. (Optional) Point to a theme and observe the change on the slide behind the list. (This works only if you have an object on that slide that is affected by the effect theme; see the sidebar "Setting Up a Graphic on Which to Test Effect Themes" to set up such an object.)

3. Click the desired effect theme. See Figure 5.10.

   
   Figure 5.10: Select the desired effect theme.

Setting Up a Graphic on Which to Test Effect Themes

Because you haven't worked with any of these graphics yet in this book, you haven't had an opportunity to try them out yet. Effect themes are most evident when there are colorful 3-D graphics in use, so do the following to construct a dummy diagram that you can use to try out effect themes:

1. On the Insert tab, click SmartArt.

2. Click Cycle, click the top left diagram, and click OK.

3. On the SmartArt Tools Design tab, click Change Colors, and click the first sample under Colorful.

4. On the Smart Art Tools Design tab, open the SmartArt Styles gallery and click the first sample under 3-D.

Now you have a diagram on which you can see the effect themes applied.