Word 2016 For Dummies
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Themes in Word 2016 apply decorative styles, such as fonts and colors, to your document, giving your written efforts a professionally formatted feel with minimal fuss or talent. It's like having a graphics designer assist you but without having to suffer through her lamentable complaints about how her boyfriend pays no attention to her and never takes her anywhere.

A theme consists of three elements:

  • Colors: A set of colors is chosen to format the text foreground and background, any graphics or design elements in the theme, plus hyperlinks.

  • Fonts: Two fonts are chosen as part of the theme — one for the heading styles and a second for the body text.

  • Graphical effects: These effects are applied to any graphics or design elements in your document. The effects can include 3-D, shading, gradation, drop shadows, and other design subtleties.

Each of these elements is organized into a theme, given a name, and placed on the Design tab's Themes menu for easy application in your document.

  • A professionally licensed, certified mentally stable graphics designer creates a theme's fonts, colors, and design effects so that they look good and work well together.

  • A theme doesn't overrule styles chosen for a document. Instead, it accents those styles. The theme may add color information, choose different fonts, or present various graphical elements. Beyond that, it doesn't change any styles applied to the text.

  • The graphical effects of a theme are only applied to any graphics in your document; the theme doesn't insert graphics into your text.

  • Choosing a theme affects your entire document all at once. To affect individual paragraphs or bits of text, apply a style or format manually.

About This Article

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Dan Gookin wrote the first-ever For Dummies book, DOS For Dummies. The author of several bestsellers, including all previous editions of Word For Dummies, Dan has written books that have been translated into 32 languages with more than 11 million copies in print.

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