The Evolution of Themes

Evolution is an interesting concept because it's change that's natural, logical, and involved. And although Themes (Office Themes) did not exist in their present form before Office 2007, they did evolve from the humble PowerPoint template. And as you get more deeper into how Themes work, you'll find that PowerPoint uses the Themes in amazing ways, and shares them with Word and Excel. That's the reason they are called Office Themes rather than PowerPoint Themes.

In this series of articles on Office Themes, I'll essentially look at three aspects:

1. What comprises a Theme?
2. How you can create a Theme.
3. Refining and Fine-tuning Themes.

Tens of pages discuss these topics -- look at the Themes index page for a detailed listing of pages.

Before that, let us understand what Office Themes are.

What's an Office Theme?

Office Themes are special files that are denoted by their THMX file extensions -- they contain important information on document backgrounds, effects, fills, lines, colors, and fonts. When placed in a designated folder, these THMX Theme files show up as thumbnails within the Theme Gallery of Office 2007 (and Office 2008 for Mac) programs like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (see Figure 1). Click on the thumbnail, and the related theme gets applied to the entire document or selected parts.

Figure 1: The Themes gallery in PowerPoint 2007

In some ways, this seems to work like magic -- but it really doesn't appear out of thin air. Behind this magical metamorphosis of document looks lie deep secrets rooted within the very THMX files -- and this series of pages and tutorials will make you aware of what happens behind the scenes.

Where are the Office Themes located?

Depending upon where you installed Microsoft Office 2007, the Themes may be located in one of the subfolders. By default, this translates to this folder location:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Document Themes 12

Where are the Themes you create within PowerPoint (or Word and Excel) located?

Although these can be saved to any folder you want, it's best you save them to a folder that Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 know about:

C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

Next Topic: Themes in Microsoft Office