MS Excel Tutorial - How To Create A Custom Theme In Excel 2007

Using a document theme is a great way to personalise and standardise your own personal or company image for consistency and a professional look in your Microsoft Office documents. Excel is no exception.

It is really not complicated to do, and can save you valuable time whilst maintaining your image or brand. A few mouse clicks is all it takes to change the look of your work book.

The elements that are controlled in Excel by theme are:

• Cells and ranges that use any theme colors (not standard colours)
• Charts
• Tables
• Pivot tables
• SmartArt
• Shapes
• WordArt
• Sheet Tab Colors

The choices that you have are vast for setting your own individual look. To see what is available just select:

• Page
• Layout
• Themes

If you try this, you will see a 'live preview' of the changes, as you move the mouse over the different themes it changes live on the active sheet. When you see a theme you like simply click it to apply that theme to all of the worksheets in your workbook.

So, remember you cannot have different themes on different worksheets, they apply to the whole workbook.

Once you have chosen your theme, you will find that the choices of the gallery will reflect the new theme, for example,the chart styles that are available for you to choose will change.

Once you have applied your new theme some adjustments to your workbook maybe needed.

The fonts and font sizes change with the varying themes, therefore the layout of your worksheet will change, so a worksheet that fitted on one page for printing, may not do so after you change the theme.

The Page Layout is also affected. In the Themes Group (in the Page Layout Tab) contains three other controls- Colours, Fonts and Effects. These three controls can be actually used to 'fine tune' your theme for example if you have a found a theme you really like but are not taken with the Font used you can specify another font by selecting:

1. Page Layout
2. Themes
3. Font
4. Create new Theme Font

Each theme uses two fonts, one for the Header Section and one for the Body Text. In some themes they are the same but in other they do differ. Once you have selected the create new theme font give it a name and select save.

You can repeat the above to change the theme colours just select Colours instead of Fonts. If you want to go even further you can create a customer set of colours by choosing:

1. Page Layout
2. Themes
3. Colors
4. Create Theme Colors

Each theme has 12 colours, four of them are for text and backgrounds, six for accents and two for hyperlinks. The theme effects on SmartArt, Shapes and Charts are operated by the theme and cannot be customised any further.

To save your newly created masterpiece of a theme just do the following:

1. Page Layout
2. Themes
3. Save Current Theme.

Your customised themes will appear in the theme list in Custom Category, and other Office 2007 Applications such as Word and Powerpoint will be able to use these theme files.

BJ Johnston has been an advanced Excel user for 15 years and is the creator of http://www.howtoexcelatexcel.com/?page_id=2 a site that shares Excel tips and tricks with it's enthusiastic members. To join in the discussion, where users are working smarter and faster with Excel sign up for the FREE newsletter and as a bonus receive a FREE EBook- 50 Top Tips and Tricks. http://www.howtoexcelatexcel.com/

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