PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Choosing a Theme for Your Presentation

No matter which approach you use to create a presentation—from scratch, from an existing presentation, from a template, or from a built-in theme—once you have a presentation, you can change how it looks in one fell swoop by changing its theme.

A theme is a collection of characteristics including colors, fonts, and graphic effects (such as whether the shapes you add to your slides have drop shadows). For example, applying the built-in Deluxe theme turns your background a tasteful shade of blue and displays your title text (which appears in the Corbel font) in an attractively contrasting, gently shadowed shade of yellow—all thanks to the theme. You can change all of these characteristics individually, of course, as you'll see in Chapter 4. But applying themes gives you more bang for your buck in several important ways:

• Using themes is quicker than changing individual settings one at a time. Applying a theme is a two-click proposition. Changing the dozen-plus settings controlled by a theme would exercise your click finger a lot more than that. And themes save you time you'd otherwise spend figuring out which colors look good together.

• Using themes helps ensure a decent-looking, readable slide. Consistency is an important design principle: it sets the tone for your presentation and lets your audience focus on your message. When you change settings manually, you can end up with a distracting mishmash of colors and fonts on a single slide or across ...