Design themes are a powerful way to quickly style your PowerPoint presentations. Themes provide complete slide designs including colors, fonts, effects, and layouts to give your slides a professional, coordinated look.
Using themes can save you a lot of time compared to formatting slides individually. With just a few clicks, you can apply a theme to instantly transform the appearance of your presentation.
In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about using design themes in PowerPoint, including:
- What PowerPoint themes are
- Benefits of using themes
- How to apply, customize, and save themes
- Differences between themes, templates and layouts
- Best practices for working with themes
After reading, you’ll have the knowledge to use themes effectively for creating professional PowerPoint decks faster.
What Are PowerPoint Themes?
A PowerPoint theme is a set of pre-designed slide elements including:
- Color scheme – coordinated colors used across slide backgrounds, text, shapes etc.
- Font scheme – heading and body text fonts
- Effects – graphical effects like shadows, glows and 3D
- Background styles – slide background designs
Themes provide cohesive formatting to give your presentation a uniform, designer-quality look.
When you apply a new theme, PowerPoint automatically updates all the theme elements across your slides. This instantly transforms colors, fonts, effects and backgrounds while keeping your content in place.
Themes are accessed from the Design tab in PowerPoint. There you’ll find a gallery of built-in themes from Microsoft along with any custom themes you’ve created.
Benefits of Using Themes
There are lots of advantages to styling presentations with themes rather than formatting slides individually:
Saves Time
Themes can instantly restyle an entire presentation in just clicks. This saves all the time needed to color slides, choose fonts and apply effects manually.
Provides Consistency
As themes update all slides at once, your presentation maintains consistent formatting throughout. This polished, coordinated look enhances your professional image.
Makes Revisions Easier
Updating themes is much simpler than updating individual slide elements. To make presentation-wide changes, just apply a new theme.
Enables Customization
While themes produce coordinated designs, you can still customize exactly how you want. Change theme colors, fonts, effects and background styles.
Works Across Office Apps
Custom themes you create in PowerPoint can also be used to format documents consistently across Word, Excel and other Office apps.
How to Apply Themes in PowerPoint
Applying a theme is an easy way to instantly change the look and feel of your entire presentation. Here is the process:
- Open your PowerPoint presentation
- On the Design tab click on the Themes button
- Hover over a theme thumbnail to preview it on the current slide
- Click on a theme to apply it to all slides
The new theme will update the colors, fonts, effects and background styles across your entire presentation.
To view more themes, click the More button at the bottom of the Themes gallery. Here the themes are organized into sections:
- Office Themes – Default built-in themes from Microsoft
- Custom Themes – Any themes you have customized and saved yourself
- Browse for Themes – Lets you browse your computer for theme files
If you want to apply a theme to only certain slides rather than the entire presentation, select them first before choosing the theme.
How to Customize Themes
While built-in themes provide great designs, you may want to tailor a theme further to your exact preferences. Fortunately PowerPoint makes customizing themes easy.
To modify theme elements:
- On the Design tab, click the More button in Themes
- Click Colors, Fonts or Effects to expand menus
- Select options to update theme colors, fonts or effects
You can mix and match different choices for colors, fonts and effects to create a unique theme.
Other customization options include:
- Changing background styles
- Modifying theme’s slide master
- Creating completely new custom themes
If you want to save your customized theme to reuse later, click “Save Current Theme” at the bottom of the theme menu. Give it a name and your theme will appear in the Custom Themes section going forward.
Differences Between Themes, Templates and Layouts
There is some confusion between themes, templates and layouts in PowerPoint. Here are the key differences:
Themes – A set of coordinated design elements including color schemes, font schemes, effects and background styles.
Templates – A presentation file with existing content including theme formatting and placeholder slides with layouts. Templates serve as a starting point when creating new slides.
Layouts – Pre-designed slide formats that determine the placement of elements like titles, text, images, charts etc.
While related in function, understanding these definitions helps use them properly. Templates can include themes, and layouts are incorporated into themes and templates.
Best Practices for Working With Themes
Follow these tips for getting the most out of themes:
- Apply themes first – Set the theme at the start before adding other content so everything matches
- Use theme colors/fonts – Stick to theme colors and fonts for cohesion rather than custom colors/fonts
- Customize thoughtfully – Carefully consider any theme customization for overall harmony
- Be consistent – Try to use the same theme across multiple presentations and documents for consistency
Conclusion
Themes provide an easy way to make your PowerPoint slides look professionally designed. By applying a theme you can instantly introduce coordinated colors, fonts, effects and backgrounds.
Understanding how to use themes saves time in formatting your presentations. Customizing themes enables you to adapt their designs to meet your exact needs and preferences.
With this knowledge of effectively working with themes, you can create presentations faster with better style and consistency. Your professional image will shine through with designer-quality decks.
So explore PowerPoint’s built-in themes and try creating some custom themes of your own. Use this guide’s tips to get your presentations looking their best with minimal effort.
