Changing Fill and Border for Chart Elements
The default fill and border (line) that PowerPoint applies to chart elements are perfectly adequate. If you want something different, play with various Chart Styles available. While this works great most of the time, there will be occasions when you may want to use a particular color for any of your data series that's not part of the Theme palette in your presentation. In times like these, you can change the fill and border of chart elements manually using the techniques explained on this page.

---

PowerPoint, Word, and Excel 2013: Applying Themes
Applying a Theme to an existing presentation is easy -- and you'll find that plenty of Themes are already contained inside Office 2013. In PowerPoint 2013, these Themes can be found in Design tab of Ribbon. The same Themes that you apply in PowerPoint can also be applied in Word and Excel -- in both of these programs, the way of accessing Themes gallery is different from that of PowerPoint.

---

Types of Connectors
If you want to use a line that links two shapes together, you may then want that line to be always linked, even if move the original shapes. This sort of linking is called connecting shapes. And to keep these shapes connected, you most certainly will start by drawing a connector instead of a normal line. A connector looks like a line, but it stays connected to the shapes you attach it to. There are three types of connector lines: Straight, Elbow (angled), and Curved.

---

Quick Layouts for Charts
While working with charts in your presentation, you may want to move the location of the legend, or you may need to add a Data Table. Or perhaps the default layout doesn't work well for you. If you find any of these scenarios familiar, you can always choose from different layouts for your charts using the pre-defined Chart Quick Layouts feature. This essentially is a collection of some pre-arranged layouts containing various chart elements. With just a couple of clicks, you can change the entire look of your chart, as explained in this tutorial.

---

Drawing Connectors
Connectors are lines that link different shapes, and yet they are somewhat different from conventional lines because - connectors, as the name implies stay connected to the shapes they link -- even if you move the actual shapes. You have already learned about connectors, and the types of connectors in previous tutorials -- in this tutorial, you will learn how you can draw connectors that link shapes.

---

Chart Area
Everything on a chart within PowerPoint 2013 is placed on top of the Chart Area -- this essentially is the entire area that encompasses your chart. Thus, the Chart Area is that part of your chart which is placed beneath all other chart elements. By default, the Chart Area doesn't possess any fill or any kind of formatting unless you have used a particular Chart Style. Even though this default status works well, you can opt to format as required. You can change the fill, border, and effect of the Chart Area, change the size and properties of the chart, and also change the font attribute.

Identify the Active Theme
Unlike the Windows versions of PowerPoint which shows the active Theme name on the Status bar, the Mac version does not show the active Theme name anywhere on its interface. If you need to know the active Theme's name for any open presentation, how do you find this information? You can find the name of the Theme applied to the presentation following the steps explained here.

---

Change the Default Theme
Launch PowerPoint 2011 and you will typically see the Presentation Gallery -- you can accept the default Theme that shows up first or even click the Cancel button in this gallery to open a blank presentation with a new slide based on the same default Theme. When you type text within the placeholders of this slide, the text shows up in black over a white slide background. Most of the time this default look works, but you can change the defaults to something else -- for example, you can use any other PowerPoint Theme, including a custom Theme as the default.

Change the Default Template
When you launch PowerPoint 2003, it opens an empty presentation of just one slide. Typically this one slide has a title placeholder and another placeholder for a subtitle -- typing any text within these placeholders shows black text over a white slide background. This is the default template PowerPoint 2003 provides -- but you don't have to live with these defaults. You change this blank presentation so that you get a slide that's part of your custom PowerPoint template. Or even any of the other templates built within PowerPoint.