Microsoft Word 2010 : Working with Themes

YOU SPEND A LOT OF TIME preparing the content in your documents, making sure you are getting your point across to the recipient clearly. Throughout this chapter, you’ve seen how you can add a little extra “oomph” to your document by adding formatting.

All Microsoft applications include a feature that saves you boatloads of time by providing expertly designed themes, which can give all of your Office documents a unified and professional appearance. Themes include a set of colors, fonts, and other formatting details that coordinate together, and since the themes are shared across all the Office programs, all your Office documents can now have the same look.

By default, when you create a new Word (or Excel, PowerPoint, and so forth) document, Office begins with the Office theme. As you’ve already seen, it starts with the Calibri 11 point font, and you’ve also seen the default paragraph settings. Microsoft Office includes 43 other themes with names such as Apex, Civic, or Metro. You can also download additional themes from Microsoft Office Online.

All of the document content links to the theme, so if you change the theme, a complete set of new colors, fonts, and effects is applied to your entire document. You can still, however, make any individual formatting changes to the document. Themes also save time when it comes to adding tables, charts, or diagrams to your documents because those elements can also include the matching theme settings.

To apply a different theme to your document, click Page Layout > Themes > Themes. A gallery appears of the different themes, as shown in Figure 1. As you pause your mouse over any theme, you can immediately see how the fonts and colors change in your document. Click the theme you want to use.

Figure 1. Provide a unified appearance in documents by using Office themes.

Theme Color Strategy

Theme colors have 12 color positions. The first four colors are for text and backgrounds. The next six are accent colors, and the last two colors are used for hyperlinks. The folks at Microsoft built visibility rules into the themes so that usually you can switch colors at any time, and all your content will remain legible and still look good.