Learn PowerPoint | Themes
Theme Builder
The Theme Builder is an application created by Jason
Schneekloth of Microsoft as part of CodePlex,
Microsoft's open source project hosting web site.
The full name
of the application is Open XML Theme Builder, but for reasons
of simplicity I'll call it Theme Builder throughout this series
of pages.
Theme Builder was first publicly announced by Senior Product
Lead for PowerPoint, Ric
Bretschneider on the MSDN
site on December
17th 2007.
With the Theme Builder, you can create Office Themes from scratch
that cover all the basics.
Download a copy of the latest
release from the CodePlex
site... (see Figure 1)
Figure 1: The CodePlex page for Open XML Theme Builder (February
2008)
You'll end up downloading a ZIP file that when unzipped contains
a Setup.exe file -- activate this file to begin the setup for
Theme Builder.
Launch Theme Builder through the Theme Builder
shortcut in the Windows Start Menu. Figure
2 shows the Theme
Builder interface
Figure 2: The Theme Builder interface
The Theme Builder includes five tabs that lets you work with
different theme elements:
- Colors and Fonts
- Line Styles
- Fill Styles
- Effects Styles
- Background Styles
In the next series of pages, I'll show you how you can use Theme
Builder to create amazing themes using these elements.
Note: Do remember however that Theme
Builder does not let you edit individual PowerPoint nuances like
Slide Layouts, placeholders, etc. For that you'll have to apply
the theme to a PowerPoint presentation, edit the layouts and
placeholders inside PowerPoint, and then export the changes to
a Theme file again.
This page was last updated on February 1st, 2008.
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