MS Office Formats, Styles, and Themes: The Big Picture

Hello Again:

Sorry, I know it's been a while and I'm sure you all have been anxiously waiting for the next blog...

I find many people using MS Office applications understand "font" as something to do with formatting but may not understand the concept of formatting including Styles and Themes. Thus below is my attempt to 'put things in conceptual perspective'.

In several prior blogs I have discussed certain concepts related to formatting; for me 'appearance' is my synonym, how the data or information looks.

As I see it, MS Office has 3 "levels" or hierarchy of formatting. There are the individual formats such as font, font size, font color, alignment, etc. Then there are Styles, which are several aspects of formatting predefined and used by default. In MS Office applications, the Style is called Normal (see blog Sept 2010 about Word Styles). The definition of Normal Style depends on the application. For example, in Word 2007, Normal Style uses Calibri 11 (and other formats) while Excel uses Arial 10 (and other formats) as the Style Normal.

In addition (particularly in MS Office 2007 and 2010) there is another aspect of formatting called a Theme. Themes are aspect of formatting that no only effect text but also effect the appearance of objects, such as pictures, charts, drawings, smart art, etc.

There are a set of Themes (Page Layout Ribbon) that are available in the MS Office 2007 and 2010 applications that can be applied to the document, spreadsheet, or presentation that define formatting for Colors schemes, Font schemes, and Effects schemes that are applied to the text and objects.

MS Office applications use the same set of Themes such that one can create consistency of the "look and feel" of your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

In the Themes command group there are options to choose a Theme out of the gallery such as Apex or Flow, "Office" is the default Theme. You can also customize the Theme by choosing which Colors scheme, Font scheme, and Effects scheme you want to use. Of course each of these aspects of a Theme can be customized and saved your custom Theme.

There you have it, looking into changing how things look using MS Office applications. If you can't impress them with brilliance, dazzel them with formatting. Good luck otherwise...

Take care in the meantime until next time, Joel.