In a previous tip, I introduced you to document themes in Office 2007. A document theme is a collection of fonts, colors, shape effects, etc. that you can apply to your document. Word, Excel and PowerPoint include 20 pre-defined themes and many more are available on the Office Web site.

Document themes can also be used as a starting point. If you find a theme that somewhat appeals to you, you can easily edit the theme to suit your preferences. Specifically, you can customize a theme by changing the theme colors and theme fonts.

For example, to customize theme colors in Word 2007:

  1. Click the Page Layout tab.
  2. Within the Themes group, click Theme Colors.
  3. Click Create New Theme Colors.
  4. Click the button of the theme color element that you want to change.
  5. Select the color that you want to use.
  6. Type in a name for the new theme color and click Save.