Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 : Understanding Layouts and Themes

A layout is a positioning template. The layout used for a slide determines what content placeholders will appear and how they will be arranged. For example, the default layout, called Title and Content, contains a placeholder for a title across the top of the slide and a multipurpose placeholder for body content in the center.

A theme is a group of design settings. It includes color settings, font choices, object effect settings, and in some cases also a background graphic. In Figure 1, the theme applied is called Concourse, and it is responsible for the colored swoop in the corner, the color of that swoop, and the fonts used on the slide. A theme is applied to a slide master, which is a sample slide and not part of the regular presentation, existing only behind-the-scenes to provide its settings to the real slides. It holds the formatting that you want to be consistent among all the slides in the presentation (or at least a group of them, because a presentation can have multiple slide masters). Technically, you do not apply a theme to a slide; you apply a theme to a slide master, and then you apply a slide master to a slide. That's because a slide master can actually contain some additional elements besides the formatting of the theme such as extra graphics, dates, footer text, and so on.

Figure 1. In Slide Master view, notice that each layout has its own customizable layout master.

1. Themes versus Templates

PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 handle themes, layouts, and slide masters very differently from earlier versions, and this can take some getting used to if you're upgrading from PowerPoint 2003 or earlier.

In PowerPoint 2003 and earlier, you applied a design template (not a theme) to the slide master. A design template was a regular PowerPoint template file (.pot extension) with color choices, font choices, and background graphics. You could have multiple slide masters in a single presentation, so you could base some slides on a different design template than others. PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 still use templates, but the primary means of changing the presentation's look and feel is to apply different themes to the slide master rather than different templates to the presentation as a whole. A template with multiple slide masters can carry multiple themes.

A theme is both simpler than and more complex than a template. It is simpler because it cannot hold some of the things a real template can hold. A theme can provide only font, color, effect, and background settings to the presentation. (It can also provide slide layouts, but let's postpone that discussion for a bit.) On the other hand, a theme can also do more than a PowerPoint template; you can apply a theme saved as a separate file to other Office applications, so you can share its color, font, and effect settings with Word or Excel, for example.

2. Where Themes Are Stored

A theme is an XML file (or a snippet of XML code embedded in a presentation or template file). A theme can come from any of these sources:

• Built-in: Some themes are embedded in PowerPoint itself and are available from the Themes gallery on the Design tab regardless of the template in use.

• Custom (automatically loaded): The default storage location for theme files in Windows Vista or Windows 7 is C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes. For Windows XP, it is C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes. All themes (and templates containing themes) stored here are automatically displayed among the gallery of theme choices on the Design tab, in a Custom category.

• Inherited from starting template: If you start a presentation using a template other than the default blank one, that template might have one or more themes included in it.

• Stored in current presentation: If you modify a theme in Slide Master view while you are working on a presentation, the modified code for the theme is embedded in that presentation file.

• Stored in a separate file: If you save a theme, you create a separate theme file with a .thmx extension. These files can be shared among other Office applications, so you can standardize settings such as font and color choices across applications. (Some of the unique PowerPoint portions of the theme are ignored when you use the theme in other applications.)

3. Themes, Layouts, and Slide Master View

In PowerPoint 2010, the slide master has separate layout masters for each layout, and you can customize and create new layouts. For example, Figure 1 shows Slide Master view (View => Slide Master). Notice along the left side that there is a different, separately customizable layout master for each available layout, all grouped beneath the slide master. Any changes you make to the slide master trickle down to the individual layout masters, but you can also customize each of the individual layout masters to override a trickle-down setting. For example, on a particular layout you can choose to omit the background graphic to free up its space on the slide for extra content.

A master is a set of specifications that govern formatting and appearance. PowerPoint actually has three masters: the Slide Master (for slides), the Handout Master (for handouts), and the Notes Master (for speaker notes).

The slide master holds the settings from a theme and applies them to one or more slides in your presentation. A slide master is not exactly the same thing as a theme because the theme can also be external to PowerPoint and used in other programs, but there's a rough equivalency there. A slide master is the representation of a particular theme applied to a particular presentation.

When you make changes to a slide master, those changes trickle down to the individual layout masters associated with it. When you make changes to an individual layout master, those changes are confined to that layout in that master only.

To enter Slide Master view, choose View => Slide Master. A Slide Master tab appears. To exit from Slide Master view, choose Slide Master => Close Master View or select a different view from the View tab.