Understanding how themes relate to styles

Microsoft introduced themes in Word 2007. Just as there are built-in styles and style sets, Word also comes prepackaged with built-in themes. Styles are built upon themes; therefore themes work hand in hand with styles. Styles are built upon whichever themes are in place. Let's take a look at themes and how it's important to understand how they work when you're working with your styles. Let's say we just received this employee handbook from our company.

We need to fix it up. The first thing we need to do is change the color and the fonts throughout the whole document. That's where our themes can really come in handy. I'll begin by opening up the Style window. This way we can see, live, how our themes are going to affect our styles. Now I'll switch over to Draft view by going to View > Draft. I can see by scrolling through this document that someone had applied heading styles and list styles, but other than that, the Normal style is in use.

Now I will switch back to Print Layout view. Since most of the styles applied are heading styles, I am going to scroll down to where you can see the heading styles from the Styles window. Go to Page layout, and then you will find the Themes button underneath of the Themes section. I can see by hovering over the Themes button that the current theme in use is the Office theme. If I click on the down arrow, I'll see a list of my themes that are available. Now if you hover your mouse over any of these individual themes, you will see a live preview of how that particular theme will look in your document.

Things such as font and font color may change as you hold your mouse over each. I am going to apply a theme, but notice first the styles that are in use and how they look over in our Style window before we do. I will go back up to Themes and apply the Aspect theme. The fonts and the colors change throughout our styles in the Styles window and in our document. The styles changed due to the fact that the styles are based on themes.

Theme sets include colors, fonts, and effects, such as colors in charts and graphs. Let's go back and select Opulent underneath of Themes. Opulent is using a pinkish-purplish color theme. When I hover my mouse over fonts, I can see that the theme fonts that are being used by Opulent are Trebuchet, for both the heading and the body styles.

Now I will switch to Newsprint, so I will go to Themes and find Newsprint and click. If I go back up and hover my mouse over Fonts, I can see that it's using Impact and Times New Roman as its fonts. Notice the change in the document to my styles. Now I will go to page 21 in the handbook. I'm just going to press Ctrl+G on my keyboard and then just type in 21 and click on Go To. And then I will close this window.

Let's take a look at how themes will affect our chart when we change our theme. I'll switch back to the Office theme, by going to Themes and then Office. It's at the very top of your list; it's not in alphabetical order. Notice how the colors of your chart also change. You can mix it up as well. Remember we are using the Office theme now. We can change the color set to something different. So I will go up to Colors, and I'll change this to Technic.

Now if I hover over my theme, I can see that the Office theme is still in use; and if I hover over my colors, the Color theme is Technic. The Font theme is still Office, as is the Effects theme. So in other words our colors reflect the Technic color theme, while everything else besides the colors is using the attributes that belong to the Office theme. Let's say our company's marketing department has a particular branding color that they just told us that we need to use in each of our documents.

Let's create your own custom theme that uses our company's color sets. I'll switch to my other file that contains the RGB number sets that the marketing department has sent us. I'm going to create a theme from the color sets from the bottom row of our first set of numbers here. I'll switch back to my other document and create a theme based on these colors. I will go up to Colors > Create New Theme Colors, and then underneath of the first number that says Text/Background - Dark, I will click on the down arrow and go to More colors, and then go to Custom. And our Red number is 189, our Green is 184, our Blue is 158, and I will click on OK.

In our second box for the Text/ Background - Light one, I will click on the down arrow, again go to More Colors > Custom. Our Red number will be 198, our Green number is 206, our Blue number is 189, and I'll click on OK. In our third box here underneath the Text/Background - Dark2, I'll click on the down arrow More Colors > Custom. And our Red number for this is 228; our Green number, 232; our Blue, number 143; and then click on OK.

Now click on the Name box and replace Custom 1 with our name. Since our company is to Two Trees Olive Oil, we will save this as Two Trees. And then click on Save. Now we haven't saved this as a new theme yet. We saved it as a new color theme. I want to save all of my changes-- that's my colors, my fonts, my effects-- everything all together as one new theme. So this time I will go to Themes, click on the down arrow, and choose Save Current Theme.

Again I will name this Two Trees and then click on Save. Our new theme is now listed under Custom at the top of our Themes window. As you can see, styles are based on themes. When you change a theme, your style colors, your fonts, the effects--all of this changes based upon your theme settings. You can create your own custom themes, or you can use prebuilt themes. Remember, if you're going to use a theme other than the default, it's best practice to choose another theme prior to creating your styles so you won't be re-creating the wheel when you're selecting another theme--which will change the styles in your document.