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Applying Themes in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel 2010

Learn how to apply Themes in PowerPoint, Word and Excel 2010.

Author: Geetesh Bajaj

Product/Version: Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, Word 2010, and Excel 2010
OS: Microsoft Windows XP / Windows Vista / Windows 7

Date Created: December 2, 2010
Last Updated: December 2, 2010

Applying a Theme to All Slides in a Presentation
Applying a Theme to Selected Slides in a Presentation
Applying Themes in Microsoft Word and Excel

Applying a Theme to All Slides in a Presentation

Applying a Theme to an existing presentation is easy -- and you'll find that plenty of themes are already contained inside Office 2010. In PowerPoint 2010, these Themes can be found in Design tab of Ribbon, as you can see in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Office Themes

Tip - If you want to learn more about the new Office 2010 interface, look at the Ribbon and tabs and PowerPoint 2010 interface articles.

Follow these steps to apply a new Theme to a presentation:

Open or create a presentation in PowerPoint 2010.
Now access the Design tab of the Ribbon. As you can see in Figure 2, there are thumbnail previews of several Themes available within the Themes gallery.

Figure 2: Themes gallery
You can also click the downward pointing arrow (called the More button) next to the Themes gallery (highlighted in red in Figure 2) to view it as a drop down gallery that shows even more thumbnail previews (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Themes gallery in dropdown mode
Now you have to just hover your mouse cursor over any of the thumbnails to see a live preview of the theme on the open presentation -- once you have selected any of the themes, click on it to apply. If you clicked by mistake, press Ctrl+Z to undo the last action.

Tip - You can also apply any PowerPoint presentation or template as a Theme -- even if it doesn't show up within the Theme gallery. To do that , click the Browse for Themes option in the Theme gallery (highlighted in red in Figure 3 above) and navigate to wherever the given presentation, template, or Theme is located. Then click Apply.

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Applying a Theme to Selected Slides in a Presentation

Follow these steps to apply a Theme to selected slides in a presentation:

Open a presentation in PowerPoint 2010.
In Slide Sorter view, select the slides that you want to apply a new Theme to.
With these slides selected, access the Design tab of the Ribbon. Choose any theme within the Themes gallery, and right-click on the thumbnail of the Theme to bring up the context menu that you can see in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Themes Gallery
In this context menu, choose the Apply to Selected Slides option (refer to Figure 4 above). Instead of bringing up the context menu you can also simply click on the thumbnail to apply that Theme to all of the selected slides.
Figure 5 shows the Theme applied to 2 of the 4 slides in the presentation (see the Slides pane).

Figure 5: Theme applied to selected slides

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Applying Themes in Microsoft Word and Excel

The same Themes that you apply in PowerPoint can also be applied in Word and Excel -- in both of these programs, the way of applying Themes is different from that of PowerPoint. Follow these steps to apply a new Theme to a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet:

Open / create a Word document or Excel spreadsheet / worksheet.
Now access the Page Layout tab of the Ribbon, and click the Themes button as shown in Figure 6 to bring up the Themes gallery.

Figure 6: Themes gallery
Just hover your mouse cursor over any of the thumbnails to see a live preview of the theme on the open Word document or Excel spreadsheet -- click on the thumbnail to apply any theme. If you clicked by mistake, press Ctrl+Z to undo the last action.

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When you apply a Theme in PowerPoint, you add a set of coordinated backdrops, layouts, fonts, effects, colors, etc. Let's just say you want to change just the colors and fonts, and retain everything else in your presentation -- can you do that? Sure you can -- and I'll show you how to do that soon.

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