If your organisation has a house style i.e. a preferred set of fonts/colours etc, this is something you can create in Excel. If on the other hand you just like to be internally consistent with your own colours and fonts, it might be worth while to use one of Excel’s pre-set styles.

So let’s have a look..As always here is a file for you to practise on. 

Using an existing theme.

1. Open up the file called Using a theme in Excel.
2. Navigate over to the sheet called Use an existing theme (note this has a pivot table in it)
3. Pick Page Layout and navigate to Themes. From the dropdown choose one of the existing themes e.g. Slate. Note that as you rest your mouse on each choice, you can see a preview of the changes in the pivot table behind you.
4. If you choose Design –  you will see that the colour palette changes – depending on what theme you use.
5. Experiment with this one.

See video below.

Create your own theme

Let’s say we work in a organisation with a pre-existing house style i.e.

Use Calibri 14 bold for headings, and Calibri  for body text.

We have three main colours we use – we have the hex colours for them. You can read more about hex colours here

#790a44

#bf5c53

#ea785b

See video below

We need to specify the colours and fonts and then save the whole lot together as a theme with a new name which we can use.

Please note that Themes are computer specific so if you want to share this theme with your colleagues, you will have to save the theme (note where it is saved).

Then send them the Theme file (.thmx) and then they use the Browse Theme to load it on their computer.