How to use themes in Excel

The Excel theme is a collection of colors, fonts and effects you can use for your workbook with just a few mouse clicks. These themes help ensure your Excel post looks consistent and professional, making it easier for you to adhere to corporate identity and branding principles.

How to use the default Excel theme

You will find the theme in Excel's Page Layout tab.

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When selecting a theme, it will apply a collection of colors, fonts and shapes to your workbook.

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Or you can choose a specific color or font to apply to your worksheet.

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Excel has many integrated themes and many font and color themes that you can use for the workbook, saving you time to choose colors and manual fonts to work together.

The image below shows the Blue Green color theme, you see both charts apply this color theme, bringing a consistent look and feel.

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How to create a custom theme

Create a custom color theme

Click on the Colors list in the Themes group and click Customize Colors at the bottom of the list.

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This will open the Create New Theme Colors window. Name your new color theme. In this example, we will create a color theme for the marketing team.

Then, select the color you want to use for this theme from the list and click Save .

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This color theme will be available from the options list so you can use it for later workbooks.

The image below shows the theme applied to the chart as well as the column below the list.

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The applied theme also affects the options when applying colors in other areas of Excel. For example, you can see the color options available when using fill colors.

1. 4 basic steps to color alternating lines in Microsoft Excel

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Create custom font theme

Click the Fonts button and click Customize Fonts .

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You will see the Edit Theme Fonts window open. Enter a name for your font theme and select the font you want to use for Heading font and Body font from the list, click Save .

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This font theme list will be in the Fonts list and applied to the workbook below.

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Theme effect

Theme effects are the selection of shadows, reflections, lines and other effects used for shapes.

You cannot customize these themes, but you can select it from the list when clicking the Effects button.

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How to save a custom theme

After customizing the color and font theme, you can save them as a theme by clicking the Themes button and clicking Save Current Theme .

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On the Save Current Theme window that appears, enter a name for the theme and save it by clicking Save . Theme is a THMX file and is saved as an Excel workbook.

It is saved by default in the Templates folder. Excel will automatically search for the theme, so you should save it here. However, you can also save elsewhere if you want.

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Now, your custom theme will be in the theme list when pressing the Themes button.

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If you save the theme elsewhere, not in the Templates folder, click Browse for Themes to open it.

I wish you all success!