PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual

Reapplying Themes, Colors, and Fonts

It's great having the freedom to apply your own custom colors, fonts, and effects—until you make so many changes that your presentation looks like something your three-year-old might have created. Luckily, if that happens, you can reapply PowerPoint's professionally designed themes, color schemes or fonts to your presentation, which clears most of your changes and lets you start over from scratch. Reapplying themes is also a great way to try out new looks.

Warning

Because many themes feature different fonts, your text may appear misaligned after you reapply a theme or font. To avoid having to flip through slides and fix misaligned text, apply the theme you want before you've filled all 600 of your intricately laid-out slides with text.

Reapplying a Theme

Themes contain information that tells PowerPoint what fonts, colors, images, and layouts to apply to your presentation. You can reapply a theme after you've added content to your slides, but be aware that depending on the theme you choose to reapply, you may have to go back through your slides and eyeball them to make sure they look okay. (Different fonts and sizes can make a presentation that looked great in one theme look terrible in another.)

To reapply a theme:

1. If you want to reapply a theme to one or more slides—but not all the slides in your presentation—select the slides you want to change.

   Section 5.2.3 shows you how to select multiple slides.

2. In the Design → Themes group, right-click the theme you want to reapply.

   A shortcut menu appears.

   Tip

   Thanks to real estate constraints, the Design tab shows only a handful of themes. To see all of the themes you can apply to your slideshow, click the down arrow next to the displayed themes. Mousing over a theme tells PowerPoint to preview the theme in real time on your slide.

3. From the shortcut menu, choose one of the following:

   • Apply to All Slides. Applies the theme to every slide in your presentation.

   • Apply to Selected Slides. Applies the theme only to those slides you've selected.

   PowerPoint reapplies the selected theme.

Warning

Warning: A reapplied theme does not always overwrite the custom background you've added to your presentation. To delete a background effect you've applied to a slide, click the Reset Background button in the Format Background dialog box (Figure 4-10).

Reapplying a Color Scheme

Professionally designed themes—including the ones that come with PowerPoint—typically come with multiple color combinations, or schemes. These color schemes tell PowerPoint which colors to use for heading text, regular text, hyperlinks, slide backgrounds, and more. All of these colors were chosen by the theme designers to look good together, so choosing one of the theme-sanctioned color schemes ensures you of a reasonably attractive result.

If you decide halfway through creating a presentation that you'd like it to appear in different colors, or if you've experimented with changing font colors (Section 3.2.4) and want to put your presentation back to the way it was, then you can do so by reapplying a color scheme.

To reapply a color scheme:

1. Choose Design → Themes → Colors.

   A gallery of color schemes similar to the one you see in Figure 4-12 appears.

2. Click to choose one of the color schemes.

   The gallery disappears. On your slide, PowerPoint changes the color of your background and text based on the color scheme you chose.

Figure 4-12. The color schemes you see listed in the gallery depend both on the theme you apply to your presentation. (The scroll bar indicates there are a few more color schemes to choose from.)

Reapplying a Font

There are two reasons you may want to reapply a font to your presentation:

• You've done a bit of experimenting with fonts, changing the text on the first couple of slides to one font, the text on the next couple of slides to a different font, and so on. Now you're unhappy with the helter-skelter results and want to reapply a single, consistent font.

• You've assembled your presentation from several other presentations—either ones you've done yourself, or ones you've cadged from the office stockpile—and now you want to unify all these disparate-looking slides by applying a consistent font.

To reapply a font to all of the text in your slideshow, go to Design → Themes → Fonts. Then, in the Fonts gallery, simply click to choose the font you want to reapply.