Color Schemes II

As I mentioned previously, it's important to understand that whatever objects you set with one of the 8 "default" color swatches (in Fill, Line or Text tools) are actually using colors which have been determined by the Slide Color Scheme.

KEY POINT: If you use any of these 8 swatches to set an object's color attributes, these objects will pick up the corresponding swatch color when the slide is imported into a presentation with a different template or color scheme.

KEY POINT: If you do NOT want your objects to change colors when imported into another presentation, then do NOT use these 8 swatches to set their color attributes. Use "More Colors" to navigate to the color wheel/custom tab and select the object's color from there.

After you've selected a color using "More Colors," you will get another swatch--up to 8 more. Those second 8 colors (9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16) can be used to set object colors which will NOT change when imported into a different templated/color schemed presentation.

One slick trick is to set your swatches 9-16 with the same colors as swatches 1-8. This makes color picking less painful, allows you to use your slide color scheme, and still enables you to determine which objects will remain the same color no matter where you import those slides.

NOTE: If you want to make your 9-16 color swatches match your 1-8 swatches, set these up right away. Once you've added other colors, it's a PITA to get the ones you want on the second row in the correct order. If the order of the 9-16 swatches isn't a big deal to you, it's not too difficult to get all the colors on there, at least.

On to some examples.

Here is a brightly colored template with its color scheme dragged up to the slide.

Now here is a brand new template with its color scheme dragged up to the slide.

Now check out what happens to these two objects...

...when this slide is dragged (in slide sorter view) into the brightly colored presentation.

See? The graphic on the left--the one set with the first 8 swatches--picked up those colors from the new template. The Fill became bright yellow (swatch 5), the Text became navy blue (swatch 1), and the Line became that gawd awful purple (swatch 8).

The graphic on the right did not change at all. It's still got a dark green fill, light yellow text, and a burgundy line. That's because the colors for that object were set using More Colors and not the original 8 swatches.

Here they are again, side by side.

So the key to controlling your colors in PPT is to assign the proper colors to your objects in the first place. Some objects you'll want to pick up color schemes when dragged into new templates, and other objects you won't. Now you can make better decisions about what will change colors and what will stay the same regardless.

(back to top)

(back to creating multiple masters if that's where you came from)

(back to the beginning of creating multiple masters if you haven't been there yet)

(back to Color Schemes and MS Graph)

(back to Working With Charts)