And the amazing thing is that they all work together incredibly well.Ī lot of designers tend to complain that documents created in Microsoft Office just aren’t as pretty as they want to be. But frankly, you can do some amazing (and efficient!) things in Microsoft Office. I’m a designer, and I know the value of design software. The bad news is that not enough people know how to use these programs to their full potential. These are also the programs that people tend to be most familiar with, having used them even before learning any design software. The big three: Word, PowerPoint, and Excel frankly just have a pretty firm place in most businesses even creative ones. In addition, you can add a pattern to your Office program, by changing the Office Background.As much as I advocate for the use of design software like Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Revit, and Sketchup, I admit pretty whole heartedly that Microsoft Office products should have a place in your software skills repertoire as well. The Office theme is the color scheme for your entire Office program, while document themes are more specific (they show up in individual Word documents or Excel spreadsheets). Themes are shared across Office programs so that all your Office documents can have the same, uniform look. WordĪ document theme is a unique set of colors, fonts, and effects. ExcelĪpply your custom theme to a blank workbook and then save it as a template named Book.xltx. thmx file in the Document Themes folder on your local drive and is automatically added to the list of custom themes that appear when you click Themes.Īfter saving your theme, you can set it so it’s used for all new documents. In the File name box, enter a name for the theme, and click Save. On the Page Layout tab in Excel or the Design tab in Word, click Themes > Save Current Theme. Or you can make it the default for new documents. Once you’ve made changes to your theme, you can save it to use again. To remove theme formatting from just a portion of your document, select the portion you want to change and change any formatting you like, such as font style, font size, color, etc. To return to the default theme, choose the Office theme. To change themes, simply pick a different theme from the Themes menu. Select the set of effects that you want to use. On the Page Layout tab in Excel or the Design tab in Word, click Effects. While you cannot create your own set of theme effects, you can choose a set of effects that work for your document. Theme effects include shadows, reflections, lines, fills, and more. In the Name box, enter a name, and click Save. In the Create New Theme Fonts box, under the Heading font and Body font boxes, pick the fonts you want. To create your own set of fonts, click Customize Fonts. Tip: The top fonts are the fonts in the current theme.

Word theme colors palette font