Create and Manage Slides in Microsoft PowerPoint 2016

Apply themes

The appearance of every presentation that you create is governed by a theme—a combination of colors, fonts, effect styles, and background graphics or formatting that coordinates the appearance of all the presentation elements. Even a blank presentation has a theme: the Office theme, which has a white slide background, a standard set of text and accent colors, and the Office font set, which uses Calibri Light for headings and Calibri for body text.

PowerPoint and the other Office 2016 apps share a common set of themes and theme elements. This enables you to easily produce coordinated print and presentation materials. Approximately 30 of these themes are available to you from the PowerPoint Themes gallery. Many of the themes come with predefined variants, which have a different color scheme or background graphic.

The built-in Office themes for PowerPoint

Each thumbnail in the PowerPoint Themes gallery displays a sample of the font set in the form of an uppercase and lowercase letter A (Aa) and the color scheme in the form of colored blocks over the default title slide. Title slides frequently have background graphics that set the tone for the presentation. The standard slides associated with the theme will often have a more-subtle background graphic that coordinates with the title slide background. You can choose to hide the background graphic and use only a colored background if you want to.

You can change the theme that is applied to an entire presentation or to only one section of the presentation. If you like the colors of one theme, the fonts of another, and the effects of another, you can mix and match theme elements. You can also create your own themes.

SEE ALSO

For information about creating themes and custom theme elements, see “Create custom themes” in Chapter 12, “Create custom presentation elements.”

When you’re working in Normal view you can use the Live Preview feature to see how your presentation would look with a different theme applied. Simply point to any theme and pause. PowerPoint temporarily applies the selected formatting to the slide in the Slide pane. This makes it easy to try different themes and theme elements until you find the ones you want.

To apply a standard theme to a presentation

1. Display the presentation in Normal view.
2. On the Design tab, in the Themes group, click the More button (below the scroll arrows) to display the menu that includes the Office theme gallery and any custom templates on your computer.

3. Point to thumbnails in the gallery to display the theme names in tooltips and preview the effect of applying the themes to your presentation.

   

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   Choose a theme that enhances the content of your presentation

4. Click a theme thumbnail to apply that theme to the entire presentation.

To change the color scheme of the presentation

1. On the Design tab, in the Variants group, click a variant thumbnail.

Or

1. On the Design tab, in the Variants group, click the More button (below the scroll arrows) to expand the Variants menu.

2. On the Variants menu, click Colors, and then click the color set you want to apply.

   

   Choose from the dozens of standard color schemes

TIP

Changing the color scheme, font set, or effect style of a presentation doesn’t change the theme that is applied to the presentation.

To change the font set of the presentation

1. On the Design tab, in the Variants group, click the More button (below the scroll arrows) to expand the Variants menu.

2. On the Variants menu, click Fonts, and then click the font set you want to apply.

   

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   Choose from same-font or complementary-font heading/body font combinations

To change the effect style of the presentation

1. On the Design tab, in the Variants group, click the More button (below the scroll arrows) to expand the Variants menu.

2. On the Variants menu, click Effects, and then click the effect style you want to apply.

   

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   The effect style preview color coordinates with the current color scheme

To apply a theme or theme variant to only part of a presentation

1. Create a section that contains the slides you want to have a different theme.
2. Click the section header to select the section.
3. Apply the theme or theme element.