- Fonts
- Colors
- Graphic effects
Or, bigger picture, you can use a theme to apply consistent formatting across lots of documents, and even between applications. For example, you could have a Word document that uses the same theme as your PowerPoint presentation on the same subject, so it looks like they match.
Check out these other tips for making Office 2019 easier to use.
A theme in Office 2019 refers to a combination of those three types of placeholders: fonts, colors, and effects. However, you can also apply more specific themes that just cover one of those: font themes, color themes, and effect themes. This is great because it lets you combine the parts of different themes to create your own special look. For example, you might use the fonts from one theme and the colors from another.Instead of choosing a specific font, color, or graphic effect for an item in one of the Office applications, you can instead choose to apply one of the theme placeholders. This formats the item with whatever definition the current theme specifies. Then, if you change to a different theme later, the item changes its appearance. This is a great help in allowing you to quickly change the look of an entire document, spreadsheet, or presentation without having to worry about consistency.
To apply a theme in Word, follow these steps:
- Choose Design → Document Formatting → Themes.
- Choose a theme from the menu that appears.
To apply a theme in Excel, follow these steps:
- Choose Page Layout → Themes → Themes.
- Choose a theme from the menu that appears.
- On the Design tab, click one of the samples in the Themes group. You can then optionally choose a different color variant from the Variants group.
- On the Design tab, click the More button (the down arrow with the horizontal line above it) in the Themes group and select a theme from the gallery that appears.
Each theme on the menu has a name, but you can’t get a very good overall sense of a theme without seeing it in action. Fortunately, there’s a quick way to do this. Just hover the mouse pointer over a theme, and the document behind the open menu shows a preview of how the theme will affect it.
Make sure you have some text in the document, in an area that isn’t obscured when the menu is open.
If you apply a theme (or preview one) and it doesn’t seem to have any effect, you probably have specific fonts and/or colors selected that are overriding the theme choices. If you choose anything other than what was in the Theme Fonts section, any theme changes you make will not affect that text.So, say you applied various fonts to a document, but now you decide that you’d rather let a theme handle the font choice. Here are some possible ways to fix that:
- Reselect the text.
- On the Home tab, reopen the Font drop-down list and choose the Body font from the Theme Fonts section. Do this for all the body text.
- Repeat this process by choosing the Heading font for any headings.
You can also apply color themes, font themes, and effect themes. Accessing them is somewhat different in each of the three applications:
- Word: On the Design tab, use the Colors, Fonts, and Effects buttons.
- Excel: On the Page Layout tab, in the Themes group, use the Colors, Fonts, and Effects buttons.
- PowerPoint: On the PowerPoint Design tab, click the More button in the Variants group to open a submenu, and then click Colors, Fonts, Effects, or Background Styles from that submenu.
Explore the options at the bottom of the Themes menu on your own, or check out the Help system in each application.