Copying, Pasting, and Theming, oh my

If you don't want to read this whole post, here's  a quick demo of a document Theme being applied to copy & pasted content automatically.

In my 21^st Century Document post & video, I touched on the "Theme" feature new to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007. Put simply, a document Theme is a set of fonts, colors, and graphic/chart effects that are complementary and applied globally. Howard Cooperstein talks more about Themes in this post, but for our purposes just remember that a Theme is a global, complementary set of formatting applied to a document.

Anyway, one of my favorite applications of Themes is that they are automatically applied to content pasted into your document. Translation: you can reuse content from PowerPoint and Excel in Word without having to reformat everything. A chart copied from an Excel spreadsheet with Theme X applied, will take on Theme Y when pasted into a Word document that has Theme Y applied to it. Put simply, pasted content 'fits in' with the rest of the document.

To show you what I mean, here's a quick video demo of a document Theme being applied to pasted content automatically. I've stepped though the video with some screen shots below. (Please excuse the misplace apostrophe in the third heading. I noticed this after capturing all the screens and recording the demo…blast! My fifth grade teacher must be so disappointed.)

Step 1

This document has the "Origin" theme applied to it.

Step 2

Here I've just inserted the "Funnel" SmartArt graphic. It takes on the effects specified by the document's Theme (Origin) and there's no need to mess with its formatting.

Step 3

If we change the Theme to "Median", the font and color scheme change, but the "Simple Fill" effect applied to the SmartArt graphic stays the same (this is because Origin and Median Themes have different font sets and color schemes, but share the Simple Fill graphic effect scheme…i.e. changing Theme does not necessarily mean all formatting in the document will change).

Step 4

Here a SmartArt object within a PowerPoint deck that has the "Office" theme applied to it is copied and pasted into our Word document with the Median theme. The SmartArt object drops the Office Theme and takes on the Median Theme automatically. Good times. Good times.

Step 5

And last but not least, we can copy an Excel chart from a spreadsheet that has the Office Theme applied to it, and paste the chart into our Median Themed document and it looks right at home.

I'm a fan, but let me know what you think…

PS For a nice overview of the Office 2007 system check out hardwaresoftware blog's recent post.

Jonathan Bailor