From the course: Word: Formatting and Styles in Depth (365/2019)

Themes: The basics

From the course: Word: Formatting and Styles in Depth (365/2019)

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Themes: The basics

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- [Instructor] Every Office document that you and I create is based on a theme, whether we're creating an Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint presentation, an Outlook email message or a Word document. Themes began with design templates in Microsoft PowerPoint, and if you wanted to create a new theme from scratch, I'd encourage you to do it in PowerPoint. Themes determine the overall look of our document. Themes are composed of three design elements. Theme colors, which provide a coordinated color palette, theme fonts, a set of two, and theme effects, graphic effects that are applied to objects like charts and SmartArt and determine what the overall object will look like. Is it satin or matte or glossy? Does it have outlining, and so on. WordArt formatting also depends on themes as do charts in Microsoft Excel, which get their fonts and colors from themes. But in Word, we also have theme-driven styles and style sets, which we'll talk about in a moment. In Word, we find our themes on the design tab. If I hover over the themes button, it will tell me that the current theme is Office, and this is the default in Microsoft Office, all the applications. If I click the dropdown, I will see more themes, and all of these are built-in themes for Word for Office 365. If your organization has custom themes that they have created to enforce branding or style guides, they'll often be listed in a separate section at the top with the company name or custom as the heading. These are all Office themes. There's no such thing as a Word theme. And this is particularly helpful when you need to provide a common look for documents that were created in different applications. You can give your documents the same look and feel simply by choosing exactly the same theme in the applications you use, in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. When I point to a different theme, you'll notice that automatically, I get a preview. So if I want to know what my document would look like if I chose Ion Boardroom, Retrospect, Circuit, Celestial and you'll note that not only are the fonts changing, but my chart is changing too, not just my text. You'll notice that my chart is changing too. Whenever we format a document, we start here by choosing the theme, because other choices that we make will be overwritten by the theme.

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