Hi, everyone! Someone asked me to post this information weeks ago - and I apologize for the delay. This post is a summary of how theme colors are used in Office 2007.
First, a quick bit of background: Themes are the evolution of design templates in PowerPoint. Though theme colors, fonts, and graphic effects are available to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents (which is pretty fabulous) -- themes are actually PowerPoint-based functionality. In fact, if you double-click a .thmx (theme) file, you'll create a new PowerPoint presentation based on that theme. In PowerPoint, themes provide slide masters, slide layouts, and slide backgrounds in addition to theme colors, fonts, and effects.
You can save a custom theme or custom set of theme colors or theme fonts from Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. However, if you save your custom theme from PowerPoint, slide masters, layouts, and backgrounds are also included. [As a side note - if you save a custom theme from Word or Excel, you can apply it to a presentation in PowerPoint, add slide master and layout formatting, and then resave the theme (when you save a custom theme with the name of an existing custom theme, you'll get the option to replace the original - just as with saving any document with the same name as an existing document.)
Evolution of color schemes: Theme colors are similar in concept to slide design color schemes in previous versions of PowerPoint. That is, certain positions in the color palette are designed to map to certain types of content (background, text, shape fills, etc.) . Additionally, once you apply colors from a theme color palette, if you change the entire theme or theme colors in the document, any colors that were applied from the theme colors palette will swap to take on the color in the same palette position of the new theme or theme color set applied to that document. For this reason, the slide design color schemes in previous versions of PowerPoint were sometimes referred to as swapping palettes. The color palette in Excel worked similarly in earlier versions as well ... that is, if you changed the color at a given position in the palette, any content to which you'd applied the color that was originally in that position would change to take on the new color in that palette position. In either program - it would seem as though you were applying a color, but you were actually applying whatever settings exist at a given palette position.
The theme color palette:
When you open a color palette in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint - such as for font, line, or fill colors - you see something like this (though it may also have additional options):
A theme color set consists of 12 colors - 10 of which appear across the top row of the palette under the Theme Colors heading (the additional two are hyperlink and followed hyperlink colors, and don't appear in the palette.) The additional five rows of complementary colors that appear under the primary theme colors are automatically calculated variations of your theme colors and they, too, behave like theme colors (behaving like a swapping palette, that is).
- For mid-range colors, the variations, from top to bottom, are 80% lighter, 60% lighter, 40% lighter, 25% darker, and 50% darker from the primary color at the top of that column.
- For very light colors, the variations, from top to bottom, are 5%, 15%, 25%, 35%, and 50% darker
- For very dark colors, the variations, from top to bottom, are 50%, 35%, 25%, 15%, and 5% lighter
Note: You can't change the above variations - these are calculated automatically by Office, and not stored as editable information in documents, templates, or theme files.
When you apply colors from any of the six rows under the heading Theme Colors, if you then apply a new theme or theme colors set, content will change to take on the new color at like positions in the palette. If, however, you apply a color from Standard Colors, or apply a custom color from More Colors (even if the RGB values of your custom color match a palette position), the content will NOT swap automatically to take on new theme colors.
Understanding how theme colors map to features: If you edit an existing theme colors palette (you can do this for custom theme color sets - right-click the theme colors set in question for the option to edit) or create new theme colors (access this option at the bottom of the theme colors gallery on the Page Layout tab in Word or Excel, or the Design or Slide Master tabs in PowerPoint) - you'll see how the colors in the top row of the palette shown above are designed to map to different types of content, as follows:
You can apply any position in the theme colors palette to any content you can format with color. However, the assignments to text, backgrounds, accents, etc., identify those colors that will be automatically mapped for you to specific content types (they also provide a guideline for best practices, to help you keep the desing consistent throughout documents.) Following is a summary of common assignments of theme colors across Word, Excel, and PowerPoint:
Note: Some features apply different % saturations of your theme colors than appear in the color palette. These colors are still theme-ready (meaning that they'll swap when you apply a new theme) but they don't match any color you can access as a theme color palette position. The most notable of these are some chart series colors - explained below.
PowerPoint slide background gallery: Along with theme effects, the slide background gallery is the other theme element that you can only edit through XML and not through the user interface. You can edit slide backgrounds, of course, from inside PowerPoint -- you just have to edit the XML to affect what appears in the background gallery for a given theme. However, the background gallery is designed to show three variations of each of the four text\background colors in the theme. The top row of slide background colors are, by default, the 'subtle' background in the four text\background color variations (solid by default), the middle four are the moderate backgrounds (same colors in a subtle gradient, by default), and the bottom four are the intense background style (a more complex gradient, by default, and in the same colors).
Through the XML, you can affect what appears in the background gallery - including uses images ... but if you want to display more than one color across the row, it must be the four background colors in the theme. If you specify a color, the same color will be used for all four gallery positions in that row.
Shapes: Accent 1 color is the default shape fill color in PowerPoint and Excel. Newly drawn shapes have no fill, by default, in Word. You can, however, change the formatting of any shape to be the default for new shapes - in any of the three programs - from the shortcut menu you get when you right-click a shape.
The Shape Styles galleries in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (though containing different formatting options in Word, as Word did not adopt the new shape capabilites available in Excel and PowerPoint) - all contain formatting options using Dark Text|background 1 as well as the six primary accent colors.
Table styles: The table styles galleries have different options in each of in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, but in all of them, those options - as with shape styles - include formatting variations based on Dark Text\Background 1 as well as the six accent colors.
Cell styles - Excel: In addition to the styles listed as themed styles - that display variations on the six accent colors ... the Title and Heading cell styles are theme-ready, and are mostly (but not all) based on dark text\background 2 for text color and variations of accent 1 for border color.
SmartArt styles: The default fill color for new SmartArt diagrams is Accent 1. On the SmartArt Tools design tab, you see the Change Colors option which provides a gallery of color options ... including ranges of colors for Accents 1 through 6 separately, the 'Primary Colors' options that use the dark text-background colors, and the 'Colorful' options in which you see Accent colors 2 - 6 used in position 1, and then you can point to the other options in that row to see that they're variations on specific accent colors (such as range of colors between accents 2 and 3).
Chart styles: As mentioned above - there's a bit of an oddity in default chart style colors, that you'll see in bits and pieces in other features that apply colors - but is most evident here. When you create a chart, by default - the first six series are the six accent colors in order - but not the exact color or any variation that appears in the palette. They're typically (unless the primary accent color being modified is extremely dark) a bit darker than the primary accent color. Chart series 7 - 12 use the actual primary accent colors 1 through 6 ... and then chart series 13 starts a set of lighter variations of the six accent colors that are also slightly different from any position in the palette.
The chart styles gallery includes (like several quick styles galleries mentioned earlier in this post), variations on dark 1, as well as variations on each of accents 1 through 6. There's also a colorful set (where each series is pulled from a variation of a different accent color, rotating between accents 1 through 6) - this is what's applied by default.
Chart colors are theme-ready, just like any other formatting from quick style galleries for features that use the new graphics engine ... they just use slightly different % saturation fills in some cases than the colors that appear in the palette. As you may notice when you look at some other quick style galleries - like the colorful options in SmartArt, for example - it's fairly common for quick styles to vary on what you see in the palette ... it's just more noticeable in Chart Styles because it seems odd that the first six series would be a variation rather thant the exact primary theme colors for accents 1 through 6.
Word paragraph styles:The last feature that I'll touch on in this post for color assignments is Word paragraph styles. Headings 1 through 9 have theme colors applied by default. Unless your accent 1 color is very dark or very light, or your dark 2 text\background color is unusually light, following are the font colors applied to the heading styles:
Heading 1 - Accent 1, 25% darker
Headings 2 through 4 - Accent 1 (the primary accent 1 color)
Headings 5 and 6 - Acent 1, 50% darker
Headings 7 through 9 - Dark 2 text\background - 25% lighter
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If you have questions about theme colors that are not answered in this post, drop me an email and I'll try to help. Meanwhile - hope this information is useful - and Happy Sunday everybody!