Microsoft Theme builder allows you change look and feel of Microsoft office 2007 like the way you want. Using this application you create themes for Microsoft word, Excel, PowerPoint and outlook. Giving same consistence look and feel to all your documents makes them look more professional.

You can also download themes from, Microsoft’s web site but creating your own themes can give personal touch to documents. It is very easy to create themes and can be finished in minutes with Microsoft theme builder. You can apply the same theme to documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets and even to outlook emails.

Theme builder is a windows only application and requires .NET Framework and Office 2007 Interop installed on your system. Once you have downloaded and installed above software’s download Theme builder installer package.

Double click on the exe file to install theme builder by following onscreen instructions. Once you have installed this application you can launch it from Start–>All programs–>Theme Builder.

User interface is very simple and easy to understand. With the help of this application you can build a theme with all four important elements that are Font Scheme, color Scheme, format scheme and Background Styles.

Colors and Fonts

The name of the section suggests that you can choose color schemes and fonts styles. In theme colors option you can select text and background colors, accent colors and hyperlink colors.

In theme fonts option you have the option to select styles for Major (heading font) and Minor fonts (body font). Major font is very important as they are of large size and carry more importance. Minor fonts are generally the body font which is small in size so care should be taken that reader does not get bored by the style. The body is meant to be explanatory not to grab attention.

Line Style

In line style you can define line style in the theme and define point size and choose a style whether the line to be solid or doted from the drop down menu.  In the color tab you can choose whether the color of the line be same as theme color or can specify custom color value.

Fill Style

In this section you can select fill styles as solid, gradient or image.

Choose a color field- you can choose to have placeholder color so objects take theme fill colors. Or choose custom color to have specified color value.

Effect Style

Add effects from the drop down menu and you can also enable 3-D and Scene properties. This section is very important if you like to use theme in PowerPoint presentations. Background, transition and other effects can be influenced by changes in this section.

Background Styles

In this section you can have the option to define background formatting.

In Line Style, Fill Styles, Effect Styles and Background Styles sections you will be seeing three options like Subtle, Moderate and Intense options. Each field should be unique such that you can get more options in the respective section gallery with a range of options.

For example in Background Style you can see Subtle, Moderate and Instance Background Fill Style. Choose solid fill in Subtle which is good for Subtle and Gradient Style in Moderate and in Intense Background Fill it should be more visually intense to make it look better.

Once you are done with all the options you can see a quick preview of your creation by clicking on the PowerPoint icon at top. To save the theme click on file and save, save them in the office installation folder to make them globally available. Theme file will be saved with “.thmx” extension. You can also edit other default theme files that are supplied with Office 2007 by opening them from their root directory. You can find them in your Office installation folder on your system.