Themes in PowerPoint 2007

By Geetesh Bajaj

PowerPoint’s pre-2007 versions all had ways of making your slides look consistent through the use of masters and templates. So when Microsoft included themes in PowerPoint 2007’s mixed gravy of consistency, there were questions about this whole thing going too far! Actually, those questions stemmed more from misinformation and misunderstanding than anything else – something that will be cleared by the time you finish reading this article.

In this article, I’ll explain:

• How Masters, Templates, and Themes have their own place in the consistency arena
• What comprises a Theme?
• How you can use Themes beyond PowerPoint in Word and Excel

Between Masters, Templates, and Themes

Yes, it is true that the areas in which masters, templates, and themes perform and influence the look of slides do overlap – but that’s a great thing – I tend to look at templates as subsets of themes – and masters as subsets of templates and themes. Thus every template or theme has a master – that’s reason enough to first refresh our knowledge of masters.

Masters: Masters are special slides that influence the layout and design of all slides in a presentation. These slides are only visible in a special Master view – and unless you put in an effort to get into Master view, and change layout and design of slide elements, you could be happily creating hundreds of presentations without even being aware that there’s a Master slide in every presentation!

PowerPoint 2007 can create and use three types of Masters – Slide Masters, Notes Master, and Handout Master. Note that the lack of plurality for the Notes Master and Handout Master is not unintentional – every PowerPoint presentation can have only one of these. Also, the Notes and Handout Masters are not saved when you upgrade your presentation-containing-masters to templates or themes.

Slide Masters on the other hand can be multiple in number – and yes these are included within the file format when you save as a template or theme.

Templates: In their most simple form of existence, templates in PowerPoint parlance are a collection of Slide Masters. True, they can also include color and font choices but most PowerPoint templates that you can download for free from all over the Internet are nothing more than a set of Slide Masters.

Unlike a master that stays within presentations, templates are another file format altogether.

In addition, you apply a template to an existing presentation to copy a new look – or you can use an existing template to create a new presentation from scratch.

Themes: Ideally, Microsoft should have dumped templates and brought in themes since they actually implement the whole consistency thing so much better. But there are tons of presentations and templates already created – and themes themselves are sort of half baked as of now – they will probably realize their potential better in the next version of Office.

If I were to be very simplistic, I would say that while templates can influence the look of PowerPoint presentations, themes (or Office themes, as they are actually called) can decide the look of Word documents and Excel spreadsheets as well in addition to PowerPoint presentations. That’s so true – yet it is not the complete picture. Although the theme implementation is so complete in PowerPoint considering the fact that templates just grew up to become themes – in Word and Excel, the implementation is very basic as of now. In these applications, themes mainly influence font and color choices. So what else do Word and Excel miss out on? That’s what I tackle next.

What comprises a Theme?

A theme in PowerPoint comprises:

• Theme Backgrounds
• Theme Colors
• Theme Fonts
• Theme Effects

In Word and Excel, they mainly influence colors and fonts – and since that is already part of the choices that PowerPoint already provides you can actually save your themes within PowerPoint – and then apply them in Word and Excel.

Later, as this theme thing evolves – Microsoft may add more possibilities in Word and Excel – and extend the theme feature to other Office applications.

Let me now explain the components of a theme inside PowerPoint.

Theme Backgrounds: Each PowerPoint theme can contain three background variations. These backgrounds may or may not change the background colors depending on the choices that the theme creator made.

Theme Colors: Theme Colors in PowerPoint 2007 are a much more advanced variation of the older Color Schemes feature. Each Theme Color set now comprises twelve colors – and five hues and shades of each of the 12 colors are also available at all times as extra color choices.

Theme Fonts: Each presentation can now have a theme font set comprising two fonts – one for the titles, and the other for everything else.

Theme Effects: Each theme can have its own set of effects – these are a combination of effects available inside PowerPoint like reflections, shadows, bevels, glows, etc.

Saving and Using Themes

Once you have set your choices, you should save them within PowerPoint as an Office Theme file – choose Office Button ? Save As and choose the THMX files as the file type to save.

Once your THMX file is saved, you can apply it within Word, Excel, and PowerPoint using the Browse for Themes option in the Theme gallery (see screenshot below).

Learn more about Microsoft PowerPoint MVP, Geetesh Bajaj, in our Contributor’s section.