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Why Save a Theme?
How to Save Themes In PowerPoint
Saving the Themes file in Microsoft Word and Excel

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Why Save a Theme?

I already showed you how you can save Themes from within Office 2008 applications. In this tutorial, I'll now show you how you can do the same from within the various Office 2011 for Mac applications -- in PowerPoint 2011, these built-in Themes can be found within the Themes tab of the Ribbon, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Office Themes

It's a good idea to learn how you can save individual Theme files for several reasons:

• Customizing: You might want to customize the Theme in PowerPoint 2011 by changing the Theme Colors, Theme Fonts, etc -- or you may want to add new Slide Layouts. By the time you are done customizing any Theme, it may no longer look like its original state! That's one good reason to save your original Theme file before you play with it.
• Sharing: Or you may have customized the Theme file to perfection -- and it's so nice now that you want to save it as a file that you can share with friends and colleagues.
• Backup: You can just save your favorite Theme as a backup -- so that it is safe.
• Use it within Theme Builder: You might want to open a THMX file in Theme Builder to edit and fine-tune it to your requirements. Note that as of now, the Theme Builder application does not work on Macs -- it's a Windows only program but any THMX files you edit or create within the program can be used in Mac versions of Microsoft Office as well.

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How to Save Themes In PowerPoint

Follow these steps to save an active Theme as a THMX file:

1. Open or create a new presentation in PowerPoint 2011. Even a single slide blank presentation will work -- just make sure you apply the Theme which you want to save.
   
   
2. Select the Themes tab of the Ribbon (refer to Figure 1 above). You will find the Save Theme button within the Themes group, as shown in Figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2: Save Theme button located under Themes group
   
   Click on the down-arrow (highlighted in red in Figure 3) to bring up a menu. Click on the Save Theme option as shown in Figure 3.
   
   
   Figure 3: Save Theme option
   
   
3. This will bring up the Save Current Theme dialog box (see Figure 4).
   
   
   Figure 4: Save Current Theme in PowerPoint 2011
   
   Here you can provide the new name, and choose a destination folder to save the Theme (.THMX) file.
   
   
4. Once you are done click the Save button to save it as a new Theme.
   

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Saving the Theme file in Microsoft Word and Excel

Themes can also be saved in Microsoft Word and Excel 2011 for Mac in the same way it is done in PowerPoint. Follow these steps to save the current Theme in Microsoft Word or Excel 2011:

1. Open (or create) a Word document or Excel spreadsheet and apply the Theme that you want to save.
   
   
2. Select the Home tab in the Ribbon. Under the Home tab, you can see Themes group as shown in Figure 5.
   
   
   Figure 5: Themes group under Home tab for Excel
   
   The Themes group looks a little different in Word, as shown in Figure 6.
   
   
   Figure 6: Themes group under Home tab for Word
   
   
3. Click on the Themes button (highlighted in red in Figure 5 above) to show the drop-down gallery that you can seen in Figure 7.
   
   
   Figure 7: Themes gallery
   
   
4. In this drop-down gallery, select the last option called Save Themes (refer to Figure 7 above).
   
   
5. This opens the Save Current Theme dialog box (see Figure 8) -- here you can provide the new name, and choose a destination folder to save the Theme (.THMX) file.
   
   
   Figure 8: Save Current Theme dialog box in Excel 2011 for Mac
   
   
6. Click the Save button and you're done.
   

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Previous Topic: Applying Theme Colors and Theme Fonts in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac

Next Topic: Theme Builder

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