From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

Applying a theme to a document - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2013 Essential Training

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Applying a theme to a document

As you create documents here in Microsoft Word, it's important to maintain a consistent look and feel for readability, and the easiest way to do that is through the use of themes, which we're going to explore right now, working with our Company Bio document in the Chapter6 folder of your Exercise Files. You can see, as we click up here in Company Bio, we have a title. We do have a number of headings as well, and it looks fairly consistent. But let's say we want to change, maybe, the size of those headings, maybe the fonts, the colors; even the title itself. We could do all of that manually, and risk having an inconsistent look and feel, or we can use built-in themes. To do that, all we need to do is click the Design tab on the ribbon, and in the left-hand corner here, click the dropdown for Themes, and you'll see a number of presets. Now, as we hover over these, we get a live preview. Notice, as we move across them, it's really just the title, Company Bio, that's changing. It's changing sizes, it's changing fonts, and all of these are options that are part of what we call a theme; font sets, styles, colors, and effects. As we scroll through them all, you'll see the last one is Wood Type. Let's select that one, just for kicks. So, it's now applied to our document. Our document has a theme, and part of the theme involves style sets. Notice that we have a number of them here, and this document style set is the very first one that's highlighted. As we move across, you'll see names like Basic (Elegant), and we get a live preview down below in the document, showing us exactly what it will look like if we make that selection. So, let's go all the way across to this one called Lines (Simple). When we select it, we see well it change in font, size, even color, and we've got some graphics in here. We have lines showing up underneath each of our headings. If you want to change the color scheme to match your company logo, for example, or just your company in general, click the Colors dropdown, and you'll see color sets; all part of a theme, and as we move over those, we'll see live previews as well. Let's go down to green, and give it a click. That matches our document a little better. What about the font? Well, part of the Wood style theme is the font that you see here in the title, and our headings as well, but we can change the fonts if we wanted to, And we're really creating a custom theme as we do this, but it's being applied throughout the document, so it's consistent. As we hover over these different fonts, we get a quick look; a nice little live preview of what it will look like if we were to select these. And there are a lot to choose from. I'm going to go with this one, this Garamond font; give it a click, and that looks pretty good. Scroll through the document; you'll see it's consistent. Wherever we have headings, they all look the same; the same color, and the same style. Now, the other thing you can apply are Effects, and Effects will apply to anything that is graphical in nature that you've added to your document, like SmartArt. So, if you're drawing rectangles, and arrows, and so on, you can click the Effects dropdown, and choose different effects. You can see some three-dimensional effects, some, like Glass, are kind of cool, and Glossy. But we don't have anything like that in our document to apply it to, so we'll save that for later on, when we get into things like SmartArt, for example. Well, for now, we've been able to maintain a consistent look and feel in our document, while changing up things like our style sets, our color schemes, our fonts, all thanks to themes here in Word 2013. Let's save our changes, and continue from here.

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