Now that we’ve created a new PowerPoint presentation, we need to style it. PowerPoint provides a quick and easy way to apply professional looking styling: themes. Themes are preset combinations of colours, fonts and effects that you can apply with a mouse click. PowerPoint 2010 comes with a set of prebuilt themes for you to choose from, and you can even create your own themes.
To apply a theme to your presentation, click Design and then click on a theme in the Themes group. You can actually see what a theme looks like before you apply it by hovering over its thumbnail image. This is called a live preview, and you can hover over any number of themes to try them out before you apply one.
You only see a selection of themes in the Themes group, but you can see the whole collection by clicking on the More button.
When you click on the More button a large panel that shows all the available themes is displayed. You can use live preview here, too, to quickly see what themes will look like when you apply them. Each theme has its own colour scheme, font combinations and effects. When you find one you like, just click on it.
Applying a theme like this applies it to all the slides in your presentation. I know we only have one blank slide at this point, but when you have more, it’s good to know this. Also, you can change your mind if you decide that a different theme would look better. All you have to do is click on the new theme and it will replace the old one.
For our “How To Study” presentation, we used the Clarity theme.
Now that we’ve laid the foundations for our presentation, let’s start adding some text!