Office 2007 Bible

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 ...