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One of the new features in Microsoft Office 2007 that has everyone talking is Themes. The new themes include colors, fonts, and designs that help you create attractive, professional-looking documents and presentations with minimal effort on your part. Themes are consistent across a number of the Office 2007 applications so you can, for example, use the same theme for your Word documents and your Excel worksheets. Themes are available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and you can also use them to format Outlook emails.

One of the key benefits of using Themes is that they allow you to separate the content of a document from its formatting. You can have any kind of document, spreadsheet, slideshow, or chart and when you apply a theme, everything in it takes on the look of that particular theme. And if you change your mind and apply another theme, everything automatically changes.

When using themes not only do you get a consistent look to your documents but you can save hours of time you might otherwise spend formatting and re-formatting them one piece at a time. Themes also allow you the flexibility of first determining the content of the document and then formatting it in a few short steps once it has been created.

Themes in Office 2007 aren't the lackluster collection of options you may be used to from earlier versions of Office. There are twenty themes shipped with Office, and you can customize these by selecting from twenty or more color schemes, twenty or more font combinations, and some twenty or more effect combinations. All in all, there are literally thousands of combinations possible. And if these aren't enough, you can always download more themes from the Microsoft website.

Let's take a closer look at using Themes to your advantage in Office 2007.

To apply a theme to an Office document, in Word and Excel choose the Page Layout tab, in PowerPoint choose the Design tab, and in Outlook choose the Options tab and click the Themes button. The theme you choose automatically applies elements such as fonts, colors, and a general graphic look to the document.

You can preview how each theme will look if you hold your mouse over the theme image. In PowerPoint, themes have the broadest application; in Word they don't change the document fonts or font color unless you have first configured a style. To select a style in Word, click the Home tab and choose a Style from the Styles list. In Excel, fonts change with the chosen theme as do shapes and charts.

In PowerPoint theme background colors are more important than in the other programs because you may have special requirements necessitating either a light or dark background for your presentation. Because of this there are special light and dark background styles for each theme in PowerPoint — when you choose any of these, the text colors change so the text is readable on the colored background you're using. To change the background, from the Design tab locate the Background Styles option and choose from the range of six light backgrounds and six dark backgrounds.

In Word, you will generally work from a plain or white background because your text will look better that way. Because of this, themes in Microsoft Word have a white background, although this can be changed by selecting a different page color. To do this, locate the Page Layout tab and choose the Page Color option.

This article first appeared on WinPlanet.com. Click here for the full article.

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