4.1 Themes and Color Schemes

Hey, welcome back to Up and Running with OnlyOffice presentations. This is the fourth section of the course where we're gonna cover some of the extra things that you can do using this software. And we're gonna start by looking at how you can work with themes and color schemes. You're probably gonna be working with color schemes or interacting with color schemes more than themes. It won't take very long to show you what themes do in this software. Along the top here, these are the built-in themes inside this software. And basically, what they are is a combination of some layouts and some background images. So for example, if I choose this theme here, then it loads up this background image and applies it to the slide layout that I already had. And if I look in the layouts then I can see a whole bunch of different slide layers that are included with placeholders and so on in there. And I can change the theme to any other theme and it's gonna update your whole presentation. You might get some legacy stuff hanging over from other themes like this background image here. But for the most part, things are gonna be updated from theme to theme. Now the only downside is these themes are, I guess you'd say a little bit old school. They might not be exactly the type of style that you're looking for for your presentations. If they work for you as they are then, awesome. Otherwise, unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no way to create your own themes. That would be really useful if you could do that. However, if you're really keen, you can actually get into the folder that holds these themes. Because OnlyOffice is web-based software these themes are just built out of images and CSS and JavaScript. So if you go into the install location of OnlyOffice, go into the desktop editors, sub folder, editors, STKJS slide themes. Then if you want to, you can go in, pick a theme, and replace the background images and things like that, make an edit to the theme document that's in there. And then that will allow you to sort of modify the themes that are included. However, the system is not really setup and designed for you to do that, so you're probably gonna find it a bit of a painful process to edit those themes. And also you would have to repeat those edits anytime that there's an update to the software. So only do that if you're really, really interested in changing up the included themes. So that's all there really is to say about using themes in OnlyOffice presentations. What you're gonna find probably more useful is the inbuilt color schemes. And one of the main reasons for that is color schemes will be automatically picked up from any PowerPoint files that you edit inside presentations. So I'm in the Clorama presentation again, and if I hit any color picker, I can see that the theme colors have been picked up from this presentation. If I look at these inbuilt colors, you don't see the colors of this presentation anywhere in these inbuilt options. And there's a couple of reasons that that's really useful. One is it makes it really easy for you to change the color of objects that are in your presentation and keep them in sync with the rest of the colors. So for example, I could select this title and then easily choose a color that matches the rest of the design if I want to have it be a colored title instead. And another reason this is useful is it allows you to change the color scheme that's being used across the entire template. So let's say that I actually don't want to keep using the colors that this template came with. Then, if I choose a different color scheme from here, let's say this one. Then everything, you can see all down the slide, all of these different slides they've all changed colors as well. And that will work for any color scheme that you want to choose from the in-built selections. Obviously some are gonna be nicer than others and fit the design better than others, but you do have that option. And then everything in the whole presentation is gonna update at the same time. Unfortunately again, I don't think there is a way to edit color schemes to make your own. Hopefully that feature might come along in the future, but for now at least you know that color schemes that come from templates are all gonna work perfectly. Another thing that you need to be aware of with color schemes is that they have complete control over the colors that appear in charts and in tables. So for example, we have a chart here that's using the in-built chart management system. We have another chart here and I cannot directly edit the colors that are used in these charts. If I wanna change the colors that appear there, then the only way that I can do that is by changing the color scheme. And I can't use a different color scheme on the charts and tables that I'm using on the rest of the design. So when you are picking a color scheme to work with and you know you're going to be using charts and tables, then it's probably a good idea to check and see how that color scheme is gonna look on the charts and tables before you fully commit to it. Okay, so that's everything you need to know about themes and color schemes in OnlyOffice presentations. Just a quick video, cuz it's a very simple topic. Now, we're ready to move on to working with tables and then with charts. So we're gonna start out by looking at tables and we'll go through how you can use them in the next lesson. I'll see you there.