Themes, fonts and backgrounds

The Design tab changes how the whole presentation looks: its colour scheme, its fonts, the current slide’s background and the slide size. Slide size is covered in Change the slide size.

How a presentation’s theme works

Every PowerPoint presentation has a theme with:

Twelve colours: dark and light colours for text and backgrounds (two of each), six accent colours, and colours for links and followed links.
Two fonts: a heading font and a body font.

Most shapes in a PowerPoint file don’t store a fixed colour. They ask for one of the theme’s colours — “accent 1”, say — often lightened or darkened. Nixt Slides draws those colours from the theme, including the lighter and darker shades, which is why changing the colour scheme recolours the whole presentation.

Change the colour scheme

Choose Design › Themes.
Click a scheme. Each swatch shows the scheme’s first four accent colours.

Hovering over a swatch shows “Recolour the deck with” and the scheme’s name. The swatch for the scheme the presentation uses now is outlined, and its tooltip says ”— this deck’s colours”.

Scheme	Accent colours
Office	PowerPoint’s default palette: blue, orange, grey, gold, light blue and green
Nixt Slides	The palette a new Nixt Slides presentation starts with: indigo, green, amber, red, blue and grey
Slate	Blues and blue-greys
Ember	Burnt orange, amber and browns
Moss	Greens

What changes

All twelve theme colours are replaced in one step, and the canvas updates straight away.
Shapes, text and charts that use theme colours take on the new colours.
THIS DECK’S COLOURS in every colour palette shows the new accents.
The new scheme is saved to the file.

The fonts don’t change, because fonts are a separate choice, and background colours you set on slides with Slide background stay as they are.

A presentation from a template usually has its own scheme, which isn’t one of the five and has no swatch. Choosing a swatch replaces it. To go back, use Undo, or restore an earlier version with More › Version history.

Change the fonts

Choose Design › Fonts. The tooltip says which fonts the presentation uses now, for example “Headings and body text. This deck uses Calibri Light and Calibri.”
Choose a pairing:

Pairing	Headings	Body text
Calibri Light / Calibri	Calibri Light	Calibri
Georgia	Georgia	Georgia
Helvetica Neue	Helvetica Neue	Helvetica Neue
Times New Roman	Times New Roman	Times New Roman
Trebuchet MS / Verdana	Trebuchet MS	Verdana

The heading font applies to titles and the body font to all other text — but only to text that doesn’t name its own font. The colour scheme doesn’t change.

Set a slide’s background colour

Go to the slide.
Choose Design › Background › Slide background. The bar under its icon shows the slide’s own background colour.
Choose a colour, or choose No colour to go back to the background from the slide’s layout or master (or white when neither has one).

The colour applies to the current slide only. The palette is described in The colour palette.

The colour is saved into the .pptx file. If the slide had a picture or gradient background from PowerPoint, choosing a colour replaces it.

Text that takes its colour from the template changes with the colour scheme, the same way shapes do. Text with no colour anywhere in the template is drawn dark or white, whichever reads better on the shape it’s in or, for a shape with no fill, on the slide’s background. If text is still hard to read, see Troubleshooting.

Backgrounds from PowerPoint files

Solid colour backgrounds on slides, layouts and masters are drawn. A slide’s own background wins over its layout’s, which wins over the master’s.
Gradient, picture and pattern backgrounds, and backgrounds taken from the theme’s background styles, are kept in the file when you save.

Items behind every slide

Logos, rules, bands and other items that the slide master places behind every slide are edited in the slide master view. See Editing the slide master.