Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 : Changing Colors, Fonts, and Effects

1. Understanding Color Placeholders

To understand how PowerPoint changes colors via a theme, you must know something about how it handles color placeholders in general. PowerPoint uses a set of color placeholders for the bulk of its color formatting. Because each item's color is defined by a placeholder, and not as a fixed color, you can easily change the colors by switching to a different color theme. This way if you decide, for example, that you want all the slide titles to be blue rather than green, you make the change once and it is applied to all slides automatically.

A group of colors assigned to preset placeholders is a color theme. PowerPoint contains 20+ built-in color themes that are available regardless of the overall theme applied to the presentation. Because most design themes use placeholders to define their colors, you can apply the desired design theme to the presentation and then fine-tune the colors afterward by experimenting with the built-in color themes.

How many color placeholders are there in a color theme? There are actually 12, but sometimes not all of them are available to be applied to individual objects. When you choose a color theme (Design => Colors), the gallery of themes from which you choose shows only the first eight colors of each color theme. It doesn't matter so much here because you can't apply individual colors from there anyway. When selecting colors from a color picker (used for applying fill and border color to specific objects), as in Figure 1, there are 10 theme swatches. And when you define a new custom color theme, there are 12 placeholders to set up. The final two are for visited and unvisited hyperlinks; these colors aren't included in a color picker.

Figure 1. PowerPoint uses color pickers such as this one to enable you to easily apply color placeholders to objects.

2. Switching Color Themes

After applying the overall theme you want, you might want to apply different colors. To switch to a different color theme, follow these steps:

Figure 2. Select the desired theme from the dialog box.

3. Understanding Font Placeholders

By default in most themes and templates, text box fonts are not set to a specific font, but to one of two designations: Heading or Body. Then a font theme defines what specific fonts to use. To change the fonts across the entire presentation, all you have to do is apply a different font theme.

A font theme is an XML-based specification that defines a pair of fonts: one for headings and one for body text. Then that font is applied to the text boxes in the presentation based on their statuses of Heading or Body. For example, all of the slide titles are usually set to Heading, and all of the content placeholders and manual text boxes are usually set to Body.

In a blank presentation (default blank template), when you click inside a slide title placeholder box, you see Calibri (Headings) in the Font group on the Home tab. Figure 3 shows that the current font is Calibri, but that it is being used only because the font theme specifies it. You could change the font theme to Verdana/Verdana, for example, and then the font designation for that box would appear as Verdana (Headings).

Figure 3. When some text is using a font placeholder rather than a fixed font, (Headings) or (Body) appears after its name in the Font group on the Home tab.

In some font themes, the same font is used for both headings and body. In a default blank presentation both fonts are Calibri, for example, and the Verdana/Verdana set is an additional example. In many other font themes, though, the heading and body fonts are different.

4. Switching Font Themes

After applying an overall theme, you might decide you want to use different fonts in the presentation. To switch to a different font theme, follow these steps:

5. Changing the Effect Theme

Effect themes apply to several types of drawings that PowerPoint can construct, including SmartArt, charts, and drawn lines and shapes. They make the surfaces of objects formatted with 3-D attributes look like different textures (more or less shiny-looking, colors more or less deep, and so on).

Figure 4. Select the font theme you want for your slide.

To change the effect theme, follow these steps:

Figure 5. Select the desired effect theme.