In another contribution from our US sister site, David H Ringstrom illustrates how Microsoft Office Themes can help you customise your documents.
Microsoft Office 2007 ships with 20 readymade themes. These are standardised document layouts that set out colours, fonts and embellishments to reflect your corporate identity or preferred presentation.
Dozens more themes can be downloaded free from the Microsoft Web site or you can create your own to match your internal design standards. This article will show you how.
To access themes in Excel 2007, click the top Page Layout menu option and then click the Themes button to display a list of choices.
To apply a theme, click on the name, or hover over one of the options in the gallery to see how the fonts, borders, and colours would appear in your current document, which will temporarily change to reflect the opion. As shown above, you can access more themes through the More Themes on Microsoft Office Online command. This command takes you to the Microsoft website, where you can browse dozens more themes that you can download to your computer at no charge.
You also can create new theme elements on your own. As illustrated below, click the Colors button in the Themes section of Excel 2007, and then choose New Theme Colors.
The dialog box shown below will appear, from which you can assign colours that suit your needs:
The Fonts button in the Themes section allows you to manage fonts, while the Effects button allows you to choose from prebuilt text effects.
Theme functionality in Word 2007 closely mirrors that of Excel 2007, with one caveat. Excel 2007 allows you to apply themes to any sort of document that you have open in Excel, including Excel 97-2003 documents. Curiously, Word disables the Theme option when you save your document in the Word 97-2003 format. Also, Outlook 2007 offers limited support for themes, as you must use Word 2007 as your e-mail editor to apply themes to your e-mail.
As you might expect, themes work a little differently in PowerPoint. You access themes through the Design tab of the PowerPoint ribbon, but all other functionality works the same. If you create a theme in Excel, Word, or PowerPoint that you want to use in one of the other applications, simply choose Save Current Theme, as shown below:
To open a saved theme, choose Browse for Themes from the Theme menu, as shown in Figure 4. Your theme will appear in a new Custom theme section.
If you need even more control over your themes, try the free Theme Builder for Office 2007. Although the application is still a beta test product, it goes far beyond what you can do in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
Visit the
Theme Builder Home page to get the free download. Before you click the Download link on the left-hand side of the page, do note that you must first install two components:
Keep in mind that the Theme Builder requires you to make numerous decisions that you might not be prepared for, so make sure that you really want a deep level of control over your themes before you download and install the software. For most users, simple colour and font changes through the Office 2007 applications likely will suffice.
About the author David Ringstrom CPA is the head of Accounting Advisors, an Atlanta-based software and database consulting firm. He contributes articles on Excel to Microsoft Professional Accountant's Network newsletter, speaks at conferences and is fond of saying "Either you work Excel, or it works you!" He markets a range of
online training materials and can be reached by email at david[AT]acctadv.com