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May 5, 2008

Joy E. Miller

To create color-coordinated slides with matching fonts and backgrounds in your next PowerPoint 2007 presentation, you should understand the difference between PowerPoint 2003 and earlier design templates and PowerPoint 2007 themes.

As a writer on the PowerPoint User Assistance team at Microsoft, I've noticed that there seems to be some misunderstanding among PowerPoint 2007 users about how to give presentations a designer-quality look — a look that includes one or more slide layouts  with coordinating colors (theme colors: A set of colors that is used in a file. Theme colors, theme fonts, and theme effects compose a theme.), fonts (theme fonts: A set of major and minor fonts that is applied to a file. Theme fonts, theme colors, and theme effects compose a theme.), and effects (theme effects: A set of visual attributes that is applied to elements in a file. Theme effects, theme colors, and theme fonts compose a theme.). Honestly, I think the misunderstanding boils down to terminology — what we called this feature in PowerPoint 2003 is different from what we now call it in PowerPoint 2007!

If you've used PowerPoint 2003 or earlier, you might be familiar with design templates. Design templates basically contain the colors and styles in a presentation, including background design and fill color schemes, the type and size of bullets and fonts, and placeholder sizes and positions. To get right down to it, design templates have been replaced in PowerPoint 2007 by themes.

Like design templates, PowerPoint 2007 themes contain a pre-organized collection of slide layouts with complimentary colors, fonts, and effects on a matching background. However, themes are much more versatile, and I will explain more about that in a moment.

And, you might have thought that PowerPoint 2007 templates are the successors to design templates, but that's not the case. A PowerPoint 2007 template is a file (.potx) or a set of files that contains a theme (one or more layouts with coordinating colors, fonts, and effects), yet it can also contain other elements, such as text and graphic placeholder positioning information that all affect the slide layouts. Templates typically consist of sample slides and content, while themes just contain the design of the slides and content. Some examples of Office templates that contain sample slide content on Office Online include, but are not limited to, award certificates, budgets, agendas, brochures, calendars, flyers, invoices, greeting cards, letters, photo albums, and many more.

Getting back to comparing design templates and themes, basically PowerPoint 2003 and earlier design templates and PowerPoint 2007 themes are similar in that they both provide attractive slide layouts with built-in schemes of color and coordinating styles and fonts. However, PowerPoint 2003 and earlier design templates provide a limited selection of pre-built color schemes to choose from — and limited options for customizing them.

In PowerPoint 2007, there are several built-in themes, and you have unlimited options for customizing them.

Also, you can work more efficiently in PowerPoint 2007 because you can see a live preview before you apply a theme. Live preview lets you experiment with how your slide content looks with different themes; simply by resting your pointer over a thumbnail in the Themes gallery, you can see how your presentation changes.

Another way themes differ from design templates is that themes can be shared among all theme-supporting Office applications like Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint. For example, you can save a theme that you created or customized in PowerPoint, and then apply it to an Office Word 2007 document or Office Excel 2007 worksheet. That way, all of your related business documents have a cohesive look and feel.

I hope this clears up any misunderstanding about the difference between design templates and themes. And now you know what PowerPoint templates are, too!

I've created a demo that covers this subject matter in more detail. To view the demo, see Demo: Add colors, fonts, and effects with PowerPoint 2007 themes.

About the author

Joy Miller has worked as technical writer for Microsoft for about 10 years. In her earlier years at Microsoft, Joy wrote technical content for IT Professionals in Windows on topics such as Active Directory, Software Distribution, and Group Policy. She decided 7 years ago that it would be much more fun to connect with the actual end users of Office products. She has worked on products such as Word, FrontPage, Windows SharePoint Services, and PowerPoint.