Office 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5.  Themes and Templates

Formatting your text, headings, lists, and other page elements individually—as described in the previous couple of chapters—takes time that you may not have. And with so many choices in fonts, colors, and graphic ornaments, putting together a good-looking document can be overwhelming. No wonder so many people stick with Times New Roman body text and Arial headings! Fortunately, graphic designers at Microsoft have created themes, a new Word 2007 feature that lets you apply a complete, coordinated package of fonts, colors, heading styles, and more with a single click.

While themes are all about style and appearance, templates are about content. Part of Word for more than a decade, templates provide boilerplate text and blank spaces for you to fill with your own information. Templates also set you up with snappy graphics and consistent margins, indents, and paragraph formatting. A good template even provides cues to tell you what information you need to fill in the blanks.

Word’s themes and templates help you make your documents look like they came from a Fortune 500 company’s publications division. Even if you don’t know a font from a fondue, you can crank out professional looking business proposals, resumés, and more.

Choosing a Theme

When you’re on deadline putting together, say, a business proposal, you don’t want to waste precious minutes worrying about fonts, heading colors, and the design of tables, charts, and graphs. Instead, simply choose a theme ...