Exploring Office 2007: Take Charge with Office 2007 Themes Applying and Customizing Office 2007 Themes Helen Bradley
One of the new features in Microsoft Office 2007 that has everyone talking is Themes. The new themes include colors, fonts, and designs that help you create attractive, professional-looking documents and presentations with minimal effort on your part. Themes are consistent across a number of the Office 2007 applications so you can, for example, use the same theme for your Word documents and your Excel worksheets. Themes are available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and you can also use them to format Outlook emails.
One of the key benefits of using Themes is that they allow you to separate the content of a document from its formatting. You can have any kind of document, spreadsheet, slideshow, or chart and when you apply a theme, everything in it takes on the look of that particular theme. And if you change your mind and apply another theme, everything automatically changes.
When using themes not only do you get a consistent look to your documents but you can save hours of time you might otherwise spend formatting and re-formatting them one piece at a time. Themes also allow you the flexibility of first determining the content of the document and then formatting it in a few short steps once it has been created.
Themes in Office 2007 aren't the lackluster collection of options you may be used to from earlier versions of Office. There are twenty themes shipped with Office and you can customize these by selecting from twenty or more color schemes, twenty or more font combinations, and some twenty or more effect combinations. All in all, there are literally thousands of combinations possible. And if these aren't enough, you can always download more themes from the Microsoft website.
Let's take a closer look at using Themes to your advantage in Office 2007.
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Applying a theme
To apply a theme to an Office document, in Word and Excel choose the Page Layout tab, in PowerPoint choose the Design tab, and in Outlook choose the Options tab and click the Themes button. The theme you choose automatically applies elements such as fonts, colors, and a general graphic look to the document.
You can preview how each theme will look if you hold your mouse over the theme image. In PowerPoint, themes have the broadest application; in Word they don't change the document fonts or font color unless you have first configured a style. To select a style in Word, click the Home tab and choose a Style from the Styles list. In Excel, fonts change with the chosen theme as do shapes and charts.
In PowerPoint theme background colors are more important than in the other programs because you may have special requirements necessitating either a light or dark background for your presentation. Because of this there are special light and dark background styles for each theme in PowerPoint — when you choose any of these, the text colors change so the text is readable on the colored background you're using. To change the background, from the Design tab locate the Background Styles option and choose from the range of six light backgrounds and six dark backgrounds.
In Word, you will generally work from a plain or white background because your text will look better that way. Because of this, themes in Microsoft Word have a white background, although this can be changed by selecting a different page color. To do this, locate the Page Layout tab and choose the Page Color option.
As in all the color dialogs, the theme colors are displayed at the top of the list and, below this, are a range of lighter and darker variants of these same colors and which coordinate with them. Below this are the Standard Colors which are the same for all schemes.
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Make themes your own
Once you have applied a built-in theme to a document such as a PowerPoint presentation you can then make changes to it to customize it to your own needs. You can change the theme colors by selecting the Page Layout tab in Word or Excel, the Options tab in Outlook, and the Design tab in PowerPoint and click the Colors option.
From the list you can select one of the color schemes shown or you can click Create New Theme Colors at the bottom of the list and configure your own set of colors. If you plan to do this, it's best to first select a scheme that has most of the colors you like so you only change those you need to change. You then name your new scheme and you can use it as you would any other set of colors.
Theme fonts are combinations of fonts that work well together in helping you to create good-looking results very quickly. These fonts work well together because they are either very different or they involve two applications of the same font.
So, for example, a font combination might include Arial or Georgia in two sizes and styles or a combination of a serif and a san serif font such as Arial and Times Roman used together.
From the Font list you can select your preference for font combinations from those shown or create your own by clicking the Create New Theme Fonts option and select the two fonts to use. Type a name for your new theme fonts and click Save and they will become an additional option in the list.
Effects are another option that you can configure for a theme. The effects include shadows and 3D effects that are applied to the elements formatted by the theme. In PowerPoint, for example, you have a series of Effects to choose from and which are named to match the various themes. You can, however, mix and match these so you can use effects from a theme such as Equity with another theme.
In the Effects dialog you will see each option shows a circle, a rectangle and an arrow. These effects are various combinations of lines, fills, and special effects. The circle shows the effect applied to a subtle style object, the arrow shows it applied to a moderate style, and the rectangle to intense styles.
In general, in subtle styles the lines are very narrow, whereas in intense styles the lines are much thicker. Fills become more detailed and dimensional as the styles vary from subtle to intense.
Effects work in combination with Styles, so to get the most out of them you need to know how to apply a style. In PowerPoint, for example, you can specify the style of a SmartArt object by selecting it and from the SmartArt, Design tab select one of the SmartArt Styles.
When you hold your mouse pointer over any one of these you will notice that some are indicated as being Subtle, some as Moderate and some as Intense corresponding with the three options for each group of Effects.
