Matching colors with the Eyedropper tool

- This next power shortcut's gonna make it fast and easy to find the right color you need when formatting objects. We're gonna test it out on our KE Company Info slideshow we've been working on here on slide two. If you skipped to this movie, open up KE_Company_Info_0102. You'll find it in the Chapter One folder of your exercise files. Let's start with this first object. Let's say we want to recolor the white border that goes around the outside, just like we see with the other objects. And it would be good to get a matching color, something that maybe appears in our logo or in the slide background, for example.

Well, you'll notice when you select an object, there is a Format tab on the ribbon under Picture Tools. We can click that. And we can change things like the picture border. When we click the dropdown here, you'll see colors. We can go to some of the colors that are part of the theme, and they'll match the background because as you can see in the background here, we have a theme used in our template, but it's not the exact color. As you hover over those, you do get a live preview on the slide itself. If you want something that's closer to what we see in the logo, in that case we can go to this new tool here in Powerpoint 2013, the eyedropper.

Give it a click, and now you can just hover over any part of your slide to grab a color and use it, it'll be applied to the border of the object. So I like this color here in the sun area of our kinetECO incorporated logo. You can see how it's applied now. Because we've used this color, it's what we call a recent color. So to quickly add that color to the other objects on our slide, we first need to select them. So I'm just going to hold down Shift as I click the other two, so all three of these are selected.

Now I can go back to the Format tab, I can go to Picture Border, click the dropdown, and if I wanted to I could use the eyedropper again, or you'll notice Recent Colors appear here. The most recent is the first color, it's that gold color I grabbed from the logo using the eyedropper tool, give it a click. And they all look the same, that was fast and easy. So the eyedropper tool you're going to find it when you're formatting objects, for fill colors, border colors like we just did, anywhere where you see the color palette.

You're likely now to see the eyedropper tool which will help you to go and borrow a color from an existing object.