But for corporate presentation software like PowerPoint, it’s a disaster. This isn’t such a big deal in, say, BBEdit, where the color only has to be close. You can’t create accurate color values for apps that are not color-managed, which is the majority. While this may be a godsend to users in a color-management workstream, everyone else is put in a tough spot. With the advent of Yosemite, the Mac color picker has acquired color management. To create a better user interface, we need to hack some XML! However, it’s a non-intuitive way to apply colors. To get the different color theme, you reapply layouts from different masters and the colors come along for the ride. After this, you could save the template and make a perfectly good presentation. Then we create new color themes, attaching one to each master. If different colors are only needed for a chart, we’ll just attach one chart slide layout to the new master slide. The copies of the Master don’t have to duplicate all the slide masters. To add more Color Themes, we begin by copying the Master Slide. This screen shot shows the Master Slide (the larger one at top) followed by its Slide Layouts below. Sometimes the colors stay the same, but only change position in the theme. Typically these themes will be closely related, with only 1 or 2 colors varying per theme. There’s still a limit of 1 theme per master, so now we have to create additional master for every different theme we want to use.
Fortunately, I figured out a workaround that brings back much of the color flexibility of earlier versions. For most presentations, it’s all or nothing with new colors. Applying a Color Theme to a single slide now applies it to the master and every slide based on that master. Instead, a master slide could have only 1 Color Theme. With the 2007 XML version of Office, that simplicity went away. If you ever worked with pre-2007 versions of PowerPoint, you may remember that you could have unlimited numbers of Color Schemes (as they were called), that you could easily apply to groups of slides to give them visual cohesion with one another. The simplest way to give a presentation variety through different topics is to apply new color themes. To find out more about how color themes work in PowerPoint and other Office programs, please read this companion article as well: Great Color Themes – Brandwares Best Practices. This article presents some new ways to use color themes.
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