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In a previous tutorial, I showed how you can apply a glow effect to a shape in PowerPoint 2010. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can change that glow color to any color you want.

Follow these steps to change glow color:

1. Select any shape that already has a glow effect applied. Then double click the shape to activate the Drawing Tools Format tab in the Ribbon (see Figure 1). Within this tab locate the Shape Styles group and click the Shape Effects button that you can see in Figure 1 (highlighted in red).
   
   
   Figure 1: Shape Effects within Drawing Tools Format tab of the Ribbon
   
   
   
   Note: The Drawing Tools Format tab is a contextual tab. These tabs are special tabs in the Ribbon that are not visible all the time -- they only make an appearance when you are working with a particular slide object which can be edited using special options.
   
   
2. This brings up the Shape Effects drop-down gallery as you can see in Figure 2. From the Shape Effects drop-down gallery choose Glow | More Glow Colors (the second from last option in this gallery).
   
   
   Figure 2: More Glow Colors option within Glow gallery
   
   
3. This brings up the Colors flyout menu (refer to Figure 2 above). Here you can choose any color for the glow using the following options:.
   

   Theme Colors: Here you can select any of the colors which are from the active Theme of the presentation. You can also select any of the 5 tints or shades for any Theme color. Learn more about Themes here.
   
   Standard Colors: You can choose any of the ten standard colors available -- these ten standard colors are just choices of colors that PowerPoint believes to be widely used. You don't have to limit yourself to either the Theme colors or Standard colors, as I'll show you in the next options, although it's a good design idea to use Theme colors as far as possible.
   
   Recent Colors: Here you can find the colors most recently used. If you have just launched PowerPoint and created a new presentation, the Recent Colors option may be entirely absent since you haven't selected any color recently!
   
   More Colors: Provides more color choices -- selecting this option summons the Colors dialog box with two tabs: Standard and Custom. First select the Standard tab (see Figure 3).
   
   
   Figure 3: Standard tab of the Colors dialog box
   
   This tab offers 127 colors in a honeycomb style palette, 14 gray shades, black and white. You can even change the transparency value of the selected shadow color in the Transparency slider below -- anything from 0% transparent (opaque) to 100% transparent.
   
   If you want more color choices, then select the Custom tab of the same dialog box, as shown in Figure 4.
   
   
   Figure 4: Custom tab of the Colors dialog box
   
   In this tab, you can chose any color from the spectrum and later adjust the selected color's luminosity with the slider on the right. You can even enter specific values of RGB and HSL to create a specific color -- all these combinations provide 16 million color choices! Again, you can even change the transparency value of the selected color in the Transparency slider below.
   
   Click OK to exit this dialog box.

4. In Figure 5 below you can see that the glow color of our previously selected Rectangle shape (see Figure 1) has been changed from red to pink.
   
   
   Figure 5: Rectangle shape with changed glow color
   
   
5. Remember to save your presentation often.
   

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