Saving Themes in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2008 for Mac

Why Save a Theme?
How to Save Themes In PowerPoint, Word, and Excel

Why Save a Theme?

Microsoft Office 2008 includes plenty of Themes that allow you to change how your documents, slides, and worksheets look. These Themes are available in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. In PowerPoint 2008, these built-in Themes can be found within the Slide Themes tab in the Elements Gallery, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Office Themes in PowerPoint 2008

You can make some customizations to these Themes and then save or share the changed Themes. In this tutorial, you are going to learn how you can do that within the various Office 2008 for Mac applications.

Other than customization, which we explain in detail below, there are several other reasons why you may want to save the active Theme:

Customizing

You might want to customize the Theme in PowerPoint 2008 by changing the Theme Colors, Theme Fonts, etc., or you may want to add new Slide Layouts. By the time you are done customizing any Theme, it may no longer look like its original state! That's one good reason to save your original Theme file before you play with it.

Sharing

Or you may have customized the Theme file to perfection, and it's so nice now that you want to save it as a file that you can share with friends and colleagues.

Backup

You can just save your favorite Theme as a backup, so that it is safe.

Use it within Theme Builder

You might want to open a THMX file in Theme Builder to edit and fine-tune it to your requirements. Note that as of now, the Theme Builder application does not work on Macs. It's a Windows only program but any THMX files you edit or create within the program can be used in Mac versions of Microsoft Office as well.

How to Save Themes In PowerPoint, Word, and Excel

Follow these steps to save an active Theme as a THMX file in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel 2008:

1. Open or create a new presentation in PowerPoint 2008. Even a single slide blank presentation will work. Just make sure you apply the Theme that you want to save.
2. In Office 2008 for Mac, you can find the option to save the Theme within the Formatting Palette tab of the Toolbox. To access this this tab, choose View | Formatting Palette option, as shown in Figure 2.
3. 
   Figure 2: Select the Formatting Palette option within the View menu
4. Another way to access the Formatting Palette is by clicking on the Toolbox icon (highlighted in red in Figure 3 below) in the Standard Toolbar.
5. 
   Figure 3: Toolbox icon in the Standard Toolbar
3. Either way, you will bring up the Formatting Palette tab of the Toolbox (see Figure 4). Select the Document Theme pane, and click on the Save Theme button (highlighted in red in Figure 4).
4. 
   Figure 4: Save Theme button in the Document Theme pane
4. This opens the Save Current Theme dialog box (see Figure 5). Provide a new name and choose a destination folder to save the Theme (.THMX) file.
5. 
   Figure 5: Save Current Theme dialog box
5. Click the Save button and you're done.

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Related Links: Applying Theme Colors and Theme Fonts in PowerPoint 2008 for Mac | Theme Builder