Subtitles of the Movie

Let's take a brief look at some more new features in PowerPoint themes, quick styles and custom layouts. But first, what's a theme? A theme in PowerPoint is a combination of theme fonts, theme colors and theme effects. I know this may not make a lot of sense, but in other words, themes are just a collection of predefined formatting options that we can use to apply to our slides. With one click, we can apply a theme and presto, everything's changed. Let's take a look at that by going to the design tab and we'll look at our themes group and just go ahead and click once and that theme is automatically applied to our slide. Look at the background, the colors, the font, even our SmartArt graphic is automatically modified. Now, you don't have to worry about matching the theme to any of your previous work or of having your charts or graphics visually out of whack with the rest of your presentation design. This makes life so much easier working with these new themes. Now, PowerPoint 2007 is also chock-full of new themes and I think a lot of them are pretty sharp and you can take a look at them here by just scrolling down your collection of themes that come standard with Office 2007. You can also get new themes by going online and we'll cover how to do that later in this tutorial. Now, if you consider yourself visually impaired or quite simply don't have the time to create a custom color and font scheme for your presentation, we can let themes do the lion's share of our work. Again, later on in this tutorial, we're going to learn how to apply and customize themes to fit our design needs. But for now, let's just go ahead and move on to another area of custom slide layouts. Now, with previous versions of PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2003 and back, we were stuck with the pre-packaged slide layouts. We'll go to our new slide here and what do I mean by layout? Layout is how PowerPoint gives you these containers, these dotted rectangles are known as placeholders. You can think of them as containers for your titles, your body text, charts, tables, pictures, movies, so forth and so on. PowerPoint 2007, we can create our own custom layouts and save them for future use. Now, we can go over that and we will in more detail later in the tutorial. And you can actually go here and look at, under the home tab, under the slides group, under sub-task of layout, click that and you'll see the various layouts that we can apply to our slides. So let's take a look at quick styles next. I think quick styles can be very easily confused with themes, but there is a difference. While themes will affect the overall fonts, colors and effects on our slide, quick styles, on the other hand, simply change those different fonts, colors and effects, how they're combined and which design element is going to become the dominant one. So I'm going to go ahead and go over here to our, actually let's go back to our first slide because I have a piece of SmartArt on there, which is this graphic. I'm going to click that to make it active and notice what happens is that I get a content-specific tab now appears for the SmartArt tools. Let me click off of that. Notice we have drawing tools. Click our graphic SmartArt tools. Click the design tab. Notice we have two of them now. But this design tab is specific to SmartArt and then we'll see our various layouts. Now, what's going to happen is as I hover, or apply that, we can see how our various SmartArt layouts are applied and the same for the SmartArt styles to that particular piece of SmartArt. See notice what happens when I click and change those. Now let's go ahead and take a look and go back to our main design tab and hover the mouse over some different themes. Now, I covered this briefly in the beginning by applying themes, but if you don't want to click each theme, what you can do is go ahead and just hover over the theme and wait a second and there we go. You'll see what that theme will look like applied to your particular slide and your SmartArt graphic. Now again, I lost that because I didn't click. I'm just hovering and you'll get a preview. There we go. Themes, custom layouts and quick styles are just a few of the new tools that the folks at Microsoft cooked up to make our lives a bit easier and I think definitely more productive. I think you no longer have to have an art degree to put together a good-looking and professional presentation.