How to Quickly Change Theme Colors in PowerPoint

It’s simple to change theme colors in PowerPoint when you know where to look!

Your PPT theme colors can have a big impact on your presentation. Download and customize this PowerPoint template today on Envato Elements.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to change theme color in PowerPoint, quickly and easily. We’ll also look at how you can create your own PPT theme colors and easily use them in your PowerPoint presentation.

What Are PowerPoint Theme Colors?

PowerPoint theme colors are like a color scheme that you can apply to your PowerPoint presentation. Different themes might have different color options (or variants) to choose from. You can reuse this color scheme, and even use your theme in other Microsoft applications, like Microsoft Word and Excel.

PowerPoint theme colors consist of the following:

Background Colors. These are the background colors defined for your theme. PowerPoint themes include two dark colors and two light colors.
Accent Colors. PowerPoint themes include six accent colors, which can be applied throughout your presentation. For example, design elements like charts will often draw upon these set colors.
Hyperlink Colors. These colors are used for hyperlinks. You can define a color for both active hyperlinks and visited hyperlinks.

PowerPoint comes with multiple themes included, so you can easily change theme colors in PowerPoint without installing or downloading anything special. Let’s walk through that process now.

How to Change Theme Color in PowerPoint

Are you ready to learn how to change theme color in PowerPoint? Use this step-by-step guide:

Step 1

First, let’s start with a new PowerPoint presentation.

Instead of choosing a blank presentation, let’s choose one of PowerPoint’s default themes. This theme is called Madison and it’s included with Microsoft PowerPoint.

Once you’ve selected your theme, just click Create to get started.

Step 2

So, here we are in our new PowerPoint presentation document. Let’s click on the Design tab to look at our color options.

Step 3

This particular theme has four different color schemes we can choose from. We can find them over on the right hand side. These are our variants.

Click on one of the thumbnails to change the colors. In this example, I’ve changed the color scheme from the green variant to the blue one.

Step 4

Themes that come with variants make it really easy to change the color scheme. But what if you want to do something custom?

Click on the arrow under our variants. This will give us three options:

Color. This is where we can change and customize our theme colors.
Fonts. This is where we can change the fonts used in our presentation.
Background Style. Here, we can change which background color we’re using from our theme or open the Format Background panel.

Step 5

Let’s choose the Colors menu. You’ll see that there’s a whole host of reset colors we could choose from if we’d like to. Simply click on a preset from the list, if you’d like to use any of these options.

Step 6

However, you’ll want to do something custom. Let’s choose Customize Colors from this list, instead.

Step 7

Remember that list of the different parts of PowerPoint theme colors? Well, here’s that list again! We can change the four preset background colors, six accent colors, and two hyperlink colors.

So, for example, let’s change Background Dark 2 to a different color. It’s currently a dark blue. Click on the colored square to get started.

Step 8

Now, PowerPoint gives us a choice of color pickers we can use to select our new color. Choose between the options at the top of the Colors dialog box. You can choose between:

Color Wheel. A wheel of color with a value (light and dark) slider
Color Sliders. A variety of sliders (grayscale, RGB, CMYK, and HSB) use can use for selecting very precise colors. This is a good choice for specific colors, like working with hex codes or specific values.
Color Palettes. Choose colors from preset palettes. You can also import additional palettes if you’d like to.
Image Palettes. Import an image and use it to select specific colors from the image itself.
Pencils. A simple and straightforward color picker that looks like a box of colored pencils.

Try toggling between all of them, to see which color picker you prefer. For this example, I chose a green color to test it out.

Step 9

Once you’ve made your choice, you can close the Colors dialog box.

Then, we’ll need to save our customized theme colors. Give your custom theme colors a name, and then click Save.

You’ll notice that my background has turned from dark blue to green, now that my custom theme colors are applied.

How to Use Your Own Custom Theme Colors in PowerPoint

Now that we’ve explored how to change theme colors in PowerPoint, let’s talk about how to create and customize your own. The default themes are nice, but sometimes you might want really different PPT theme colors for your project.

Let’s say you’re working with a PowerPoint template that doesn’t have variant color themes included. Are we stuck with what we’ve got? Nope, you can customize it! Let’s test this out with this professional PowerPoint presentation design:

This stylish PowerPoint design theme is available for download now on Envato Elements.