Section 4.3. Reapplying Themes, Colors, and Fonts

4.3. Reapplying Themes, Colors, and Fonts

It's great having the freedom to apply your own custom colors, fonts, and effectsuntil 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 (page 32), 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.

4.3.1. 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:

If you want to reapply a theme to one or more slidesbut not all the slides in your presentationselect the slides you want to change.

Page 52 shows you how to select multiple slides.
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.
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: 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 Reset Background in the Format Background dialog box (Figure 4-11).

UP TO SPEED
Deciphering Color Schemes

Imagine you've selected a theme, and now you want to choose one of the theme's color schemes. You've selected Design Colors, and now youre looking at the gallery of color schemes that goes with a particular theme, trying to decide among them. (Figure 4-13 shows you the color schemes associated with one popular theme.)

Sure, PowerPoint previews each color scheme on your slide as you mouse over the schemebut if your slide doesn't happen to contain, say, a hyperlink, how on earth are you supposed to know which of the eight tiny little color swatches is the hyperlink color?

The gallery doesn't give you a clue and if you don't know the answer, you may be in for a rude surprise when you do add a hyperlink to your presentation.

The trick is that the eight swatches you see in a color scheme correspond to position numbers 3 through 10 of the 12 total swatches PowerPoint assigns per color scheme. To see which swatches correspond to which slide elements, from the color gallery (which you display by selecting Design Themes Theme Colors), click Create New Theme Colors.

Positions 14 let you switch from a light background to a dark one and still have visible text:

Position 1. Text color on dark background
Position 2. Text color on light background
Position 3. Light background color
Position 4. Dark background color

The style options in positions 510 correspond to the thumbnails PowerPoint displays in, for example, the Quick Styles and chart galleries.

Position 5. First style option displayed
Position 6. Second style option displayed
Position 7. Third style option displayed
Position 8. Fourth style option displayed
Position 9. Fifth style option displayed
Position 10. Sixth style option displayed
Position 11. Hyperlink color
Position 12. Followed hyperlink color

4.3.2. Reapplying a Color Scheme

Professionally designed themesincluding the ones that come with PowerPointtypically 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 (page 90) 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:

Choose Design Themes Colors.

A gallery of color schemes similar to the one you see in Figure 4-13 appears.

Figure 4-13. The color schemes you see listed in the gallery depend both on the theme you apply to your presentation, and whether or not you create new custom color schemes. Here, the color schemes run from Office to Origin and beyond. (The scroll bar indicates there are a few more color schemes to choose from.)

Click to choose one of the color schemes. (See the box on page 137 for tips on choosing a scheme. )

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

4.3.3. 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 presentationseither ones you've done yourself, or ones you've cadged from the office stockpileand 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.

UP TO SPEED
Creating Your Own Theme Font Scheme

While PowerPoint doesn't let you create your own fonts, it does let you specify a custom theme font . A theme font tells PowerPoint which fonts you want to use to display heading and non-heading text for your entire slideshow. If you want all of the title text in your slideshow to appear in the Stencil font and all the body text to appear in the Tahoma font, you can do that by creating your own custom theme font. After you create a custom theme font, you can apply it to your slideshow as described above.

To create a custom theme font:

Choose Design Fonts Create New Theme Fonts.
Click the down arrow next to "Body font" to choose the font you want to appear in the non-heading text of your presentation.
In the Name box, type a short name for your font scheme. This name appears in the Font gallery, so keep it brief.
Click Save.

PowerPoint applies your new font selections to your presentation. The next time you select Design Themes Fonts, your custom theme font appears in the Fonts gallery.