Variations on a Theme by Office

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

Chris van Marde — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 18:46:23 GMT

My biggest complain about most styles (document templates, table styles) in Office is that thay always seem to be aimed at color printing. Well, most customers don't have color printers, and it's difficult to guess how a colored document will look printed on a grayscale printer.

In Photoshop I can change the entire image to grayscale with a simple click. Unfortunately there is no simple option to do that in Office.

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

Howard Cooperstein — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 19:07:46 GMT

Hi Chris,
We have a "grayscale" color scheme in the Theme Colors dropdown (in the UI picture above.) It'll convert all schemed content to shades of gray. So, Word, PPT and XL will have this in 2007. Current versions of PowerPoint have this in the View menu and in the print dialog and print preview feature.

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

netfreak — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 19:30:51 GMT

I like that Theme thing, cause I do have some style in my documents that I'd like to apply easily to all my documents, but the very important thing for me in this is the theme to be easily created. So I guess you should make some theme creation dialogue, in which there would be a picture of the document so that when you change a setting the document would change. I guess it would be easier for the user to understand what he's chaging.
I tried to create theme in Excel, the worst thing is that there were so many settings that I wasn't sure if that setting meant what I though it meant, so a vivid picture would do great.
BTW, Jensen, it is March already, perhaps you can hint on when should we start downloading Beta-1 Refresh, I'm eager to see the changes that you've done, plus, I hope, charting will at last work on my comp.(hints like 'soon' are not exactly what everyone would like to read :-), the date would do :-) )

Love Office 2007

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re: Variations on a Theme by Office

jensenh — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 22:16:45 GMT

netfreak:

March 1 and already the "it's March" discussion begins... :)

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

netfreak — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 00:21:48 GMT

Yep :-)
You can run, but you can't hide :-)

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

muro — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 10:06:47 GMT

There is a visual inconsistency in the first pdf file (Atrium Theme transform, The process):

There are reflections of the elements (circles) in the later versions - however, each reflection is directly under the element. The big circle (going under the 5 smaller) has the reflection only at the bottom, but the upper smaller circles have their reflections higher - this just makes your eyes crazy - you notice immediately, there is something wrong.

Regards, muro

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

Jon Peltier — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 16:40:38 GMT

"Real" templates for PowerPoint, I assume that means more than just the colors, but that templates will be able to contain a presentation skeleton, complete with all the boilerplate.

The point Chris made about colors and B&W printers goes double for faxes, since a fax isn't usually great at rendering grayscales. Fewer colors and effects are generally better, easier to print and reproduce, easier not to obfuscate the content. All the colors and shadows and reflections and transparency effects remind me of a comment made by a well-known PowerPoint MVP, which I've reused on my own web site:

"Pardon me, sir, is that a slide or is your dog ill?"

In the hands of the 2% of users who have some artistic taste, all of these themes will be fine. The other 98%??

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

Howard Cooperstein — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 21:19:09 GMT

Jon: yep, Templates can contain starting content, boilerplate, etc. PPT always had this -- it's just it wasn't clear when you saved a template whether it was for that purpose or to be used as a "Design." Themes can't contain content--they are just "the look." So save a tempalte, it shows up in File | New dialog of the app that created it; save a theme it shows up in the theme gallery (in all three apps.)

Re: slide design -- good question to pose. The intention is empowering the _98%_ to create tasteful docs easily. The slides I show use the richest style as it demos theme changes more clearly. The other 80% of the galleries are filled with moderate and subtle choices. I think we'll all take fewer trips to the vet.

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

rayburger — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:28:50 GMT

How do themes interact with downlevel versions of Office?
Also, how many of these changes in O12 will flow down to Office 2003/XP/2000 if you save as .??? and not .???x

Maybe Jensen can do an entry on the whole interoperability issue, including the converters, viewers and add-ins for previous versions to interact with O12 files.

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

Howard Cooperstein — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 04:02:07 GMT

Ray: as you mention this is a much larger topic than just themes... but we basically flatten the themed formatting into direct formatting. We keep some information connected to that content that let's us rehydrate it back into themed content into Ofc 2007.

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

rayburger — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 02:18:04 GMT

Thanks Howard. One more question: Are themes embedded in the document you are working on, or are they "connected" to it via a separate file stored on a specific PC, like templates?

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

Howard Cooperstein — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 11:35:58 GMT

The theme is inside the document it controls (like the first picture in my post.)

When you apply a Theme via the gallery, we *copy* the contents of the theme file into the document's theme "area."

Word is the only app that has the ability to inherit formatting from a link to a template. Even with that additional capability, Word, PPT and XL all simply carry their doc's theme inside the doc.

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

rayburger — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 02:03:59 GMT

Ah! Now I get the pictures :)

Thanks for explaining.

re: Variations on a Theme by Office (Greyscale)

Bob Buckland ?:-) — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 03:21:39 GMT

Hi Howard,

Could you clarify the 'greyscale' color scheme you mentioned?

In a corporate environment the available schemes/themes would likely be locked down to those 'approved' for use in company documentation.

Is the greyscale feature simply the ability to work with all available themes/schemes but letting you work in a screen environment that reflects how your output will appear on a (currently selected) greyscale/laser printer or it the greyscale choice something that acutally changes the document (along the lines of the 'greyscale' color choice you can use in Word 2003 to change an individual graphic.

Ideally, both methods would be supported with tools (one that changes the the document vs one that changes only how things look on screen to work in a mode to reflect your probable output) I'm hoping that one tool won't be seen as the solution to both scenarios :)

Bob Buckland ?:-)

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

err229 — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 21:15:19 GMT

Howard,

This may be an example of "user stupidity" on my part, but even though I can change the color and font attributes of a theme, I can't seem to change the effects. Am I missing something, or is there really no Create New under the effects drop-down?

BTW - love the idea of themes, and so far they seem to be working pretty well! They will reduce a lot of the template and macro development we've needed to do just to give our users this type of tool.

re: Variations on a Theme by Office

Howard Cooperstein — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 12:07:39 GMT

Bob: the Grayscale color scheme is simply a way to colorize themed content to grayscale for better color differentiation when printing. PowerPoint also has a special grayscale preview mode (no color scheme required) that lets you decide how you want each object to appear when printed to black and white printers. Word and Excel don't have this special view.

Err229: Not user stupidity at all. We have no dialog for creating new Theme Effect (as we do for colors and fonts.) An Theme Effects editor dialog was simply too expensive to build this release. We have a separate tool we plan to release for sophisticated users and Theme designers that will let you create these.

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