The PowerPoint templates come with built-in color schemes, which are coordinated sets of colors chosen by color professionals. Microsoft paid these people enormous sums of money to debate the merits of using mauve text on a teal background. You can use these professionally designed color schemes, or you can create your own if you think that you have a better eye than the Microsoft-hired color guns.
The PowerPoint color schemes are the best thing to come along since Peanut M&Ms. Without color schemes, people would be free to pick and choose from among the 16 million or so colors that PowerPoint lets you incorporate into your slides. The resulting slides could easily appear next to Cher and Roseanne in People magazine's annual "Worst Dressed of the Year" issue.
Each color scheme has eight colors, with each color designated for a particular use, as shown in this list:
- Background color: Used for the slide background.
- Text-and-lines color: Used for any text or drawn lines that appear on the slide, with the exception of the title text. This is usually a color that contrasts with the background color. If the background color is dark, the text-and-lines color is generally light, and vice versa.
- Shadows color: Used to produce shadow effects for objects drawn on the slide. It is usually a darker version of the background color, unless the background color is very dark. In that case, the shadow color is often a lighter version of the background color.
- Title text color: Used for the slide's title text. Like the text-and-lines color, the title text color contrasts with the background color so that the text is readable. The title text usually complements the text-and-lines color to provide an evenly balanced effect. (That sounds like something an artist would say, doesn't it?)
- Fills color: When you create an object, such as a rectangle or an ellipse, this color is the default fill color to color the object.
- Accent colors: The last three colors in the color scheme. They are used for odds and ends that you can add to your slide. You may use them to color the bars in a bar chart, for example, or the slices in a pie chart. Two of these accent colors are also used to indicate hyperlinks.
Each slide in your presentation can have its own color scheme. The Slide Master also has a color scheme, which is used for all slides that don't specify their own deviant color scheme. To ensure that your slides have a uniform look, simply allow them to pick up the color scheme from the Slide Master. If you want one slide to stand out from the other slides in your presentation, assign it a different color scheme.
PowerPoint picks up the initial color scheme for a presentation from the template on which the presentation is based to serve as a part of the template's Slide Master. However, each template also includes several alternate color schemes, which are designed to complement the main color scheme for the template. You can change the Master scheme later, but if you apply a new template, the new template's scheme overrides any change that you made to the original template's color scheme.
If you find a template that you like but aren't happy with any of its color schemes, you can create your own. The easiest way to do this is to choose a scheme that's close to the colors you want and then modify the scheme's colors. I present the procedure to do so later in this chapter.
You can override the Master color scheme for an individual slide. You can also change the color for any object to any color in the scheme, or to any other color known to science.
 | Don't get all in a tizzy about color schemes if you plan to print overhead slides on a black-and-white laser printer. The slides look dazzling on-screen, but all those stunning colors are printed in boring shades of gray. |
Using a different color scheme
If you don't like your presentation's color scheme, change it! Here's a simple way:
1. Switch to Normal View if you aren't already there.
Click the Normal View button or choose View --> Normal.
2. Choose Format --> Slide Design.
The Slide Design task pane appears to the right of the slide.
3. Click Color Schemes at the top of the Slide Design task pane.
The Color Schemes task pane appears, as shown in Figure 1. As you can see, the Color Scheme task pane shows the color schemes that are available for your presentation.
Figure 1: Changing a slide's color scheme.
4. Click the color scheme that you want to use.
You're done!
For most presentations, you'll want to use the same color scheme for all the slides in the presentation. However, in some cases you may want to use two or more color schemes to draw attention to certain slides in your presentation or to give your audience an immediate visual clue to your slide's contents.
| If only one slide is selected when you click a color scheme, PowerPoint changes the color scheme for all slides in the presentation as if you chose Apply to All. However, if two or more slides are selected, PowerPoint changes just the selected slides as if you clicked Apply to Selected Slides. |
 | When you change the color scheme for the entire presentation by clicking Apply to All, any slides to which you have applied a custom color scheme are changed as well. |
Changing colors in a color scheme
To change one or more of the colors in the current color scheme, follow these steps:
1. Select the slide whose color scheme you want to change.
2. Choose Format --> Slide Design, and then click Color Scheme.
The Color Scheme task pane appears. Refer to Figure 1 if you've forgotten what it looks like.
3. Click Edit Color Schemes at the bottom of the Color Scheme task pane.
The Edit Color Scheme dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Editing a color scheme.
4. Click the color box that you want to change.
5. Click the Change Color button.
The dialog box shown in Figure 3 appears. As you can see, PowerPoint displays what looks like a tie-dyed version of Chinese checkers.
Figure 3: Changing a color.
6. Click the color that you want and click OK.
If you want white or black or a shade of gray, click one of the color hexagons at the bottom of the dialog box. Otherwise, click one of the colored hexagons. After you click OK, you zip back to the Color Scheme dialog box.
7. Choose Apply.
The change is applied to the color scheme.
| Be warned that after you deviate from the preselected color scheme combinations, you better have some color sense. If you can't tell chartreuse from lime, leave this stuff to the pros. |
 | The Standard tab of the Background Color dialog box (shown in Figure 3) shows 127 popular colors, plus white, black, and shades of gray. If you want to use a color that doesn't appear in the dialog box, click the Custom tab. This step draws forth the custom color controls, shown in Figure 4. Here, you can construct any of the 16 million colors that are theoretically possible with PowerPoint. You need a PhD in physics to figure out how to adjust the Red, Green, and Blue controls, though. |
Figure 4: PowerPoint offers billions and billions of colors from which you can choose.
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