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A theme is a set of unified design elements and color schemes. A theme helps you easily create professional and well-designed documents for viewing in Microsoft Word, in e-mail, or on the Web.

When you apply a theme to a document, Word customizes the following elements: link bars (link bars: A collection of graphic or text buttons representing hyperlinks to pages within your Web site and to external sites.), background colors or graphics, body and heading styles (heading style: Formatting applied to a heading. Microsoft Word has nine different built-in styles: Heading 1 through Heading 9.), lists, horizontal lines, hyperlink (hyperlink: Colored and underlined text or a graphic that you click to go to a file, a location in a file, a Web page on the World Wide Web, or a Web page on an intranet. Hyperlinks can also go to newsgroups and to Gopher, Telnet, and FTP sites.) colors, and table border colors. Both the single-level and the multiple-level lists are also customized.

To quickly change the appearance of these elements, you can change the theme.

Unlike a template (template: A file or files that contain the structure and tools for shaping such elements as the style and page layout of finished files. For example, Word templates can shape a single document, and FrontPage templates can shape an entire Web site.), a theme does not provide AutoText (AutoText: A storage location for text or graphics you want to use again, such as a standard contract clause or a long distribution list. Each selection of text or graphics is recorded as an AutoText entry and is assigned a unique name.) entries, custom toolbars (toolbar: A bar with buttons and options that you use to carry out commands. To display a toolbar, press ALT and then SHIFT+F10.), macros (macro: An action or a set of actions that you can use to automate tasks. Macros are recorded in the Visual Basic for Applications programming language.), menu (menu: A list of commands that is displayed when you click a menu name on a menu bar or other toolbar.) settings, or shortcut keys (shortcut key: A function key or key combination, such as F5 or CTRL+A, that you use to carry out a menu command. In contrast, an access key is a key combination, such as ALT+F, that moves the focus to a menu, command, or control.).

You can also select options to apply brighter colors to text and graphics, animate certain theme graphics, or apply a background to your document. To see the animation of theme graphics, view the Web page in a Web browser (browser: Software that interprets HTML files, formats them into Web pages, and displays them. A Web browser, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, can follow hyperlinks, transfer files, and play sound or video files that are embedded in Web pages.).