Office 2007 Bible

Applying a Theme

As you learned in the section “Understanding Layouts and Themes” at the beginning of this chapter, themes are the PowerPoint 2007 way of applying different designs to the presentation. A theme includes a background graphic (usually), color and font choices, and graphic effect settings. A theme can also include custom layouts, although these are not available when you apply the theme to an existing presentation. (More on that quandary later in the chapter.)

The method for applying a theme depends on whether that theme is already available in the current presentation or not. Some themes are built into PowerPoint so that they are always available; other themes are available only when you use certain templates, or when you specifically apply them from an external file. The following sections explain each of those possibilities.

Note

Themes, also called design themes, contain a combination of colors, fonts, effects, backgrounds, and layouts. There are also more specialized themes: color themes, font themes, and effect themes. When this book uses the term “theme” alone, it’s referring to a design theme. Where there is potential for confusion, the book calls it a design theme to help differentiate it from the lesser types of themes.

Applying a theme from the gallery

A gallery in PowerPoint is a menu of samples from which you can choose. The Themes gallery is a menu of all of the built-in themes plus any additional themes available from the current template or presentation ...