Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013.
In this section, we’re going to look at Themes and Styles.
Now to some extent what we’re going to cover in this section is a little bit ahead of the
rest of the course, but in order to understand the next couple of sections, you’re going
to need to have a reasonable idea of what themes and styles are.
And I’m, first of all, going to demonstrate themes and styles using one of the standard
templates that’s available with Excel 2013.
So what we’re going to do is to choose the Calendar Template and create a new workbook
based on the Calendar Template and there it is.
It’s a very straightforward workbook this.
It’s got a single sheet which is the calendar and the one that you get by default at least
at the time I’m running this is the 2013 calendar.
And as it says over here if you need a different year enter your preferred calendar year in
Cell B2.
This is another case where some of the cells in this worksheet are merged.
And if you click in Cell B2, which appears to be about there, you’re actually getting
a cell which really spans what were originally several cells.
Now incidentally this particular worksheet, this calendar demonstrates that the number
of rows in a worksheet can be more than you can see in one view.
You may realize already that the number of rows can go on.
In fact, it can go up to many thousands of rows.
And here you can see how if I scroll down the worksheet content, the calendar, the 12
months down to December 2013 goes on to a very large number of rows.
And similarly if I scroll off to the right, you can see the column numbers at the top
there going through the letters of the alphabet.
Well, in fact beyond that it can go up into A’s, B’s, and again thousands and thousands
of those are possible.
So you’re not restricted in Excel 2013 to what you can see in the view, but more of
that later.
Now one of the things that are being done in this particular template and in this calendar
is to use a theme.
Now when you’re formatting this is really primarily for the purposes if you like cosmetics.
When you’re formatting a worksheet, when you’re putting in the colors, the fonts,
and so on, you can adopt either one of the standard Excel 2013 themes or you can even
create a theme of your own.
And when you’re formatting there are basically three levels of formatting and the theme is
at the top level of the formatting.
Now let me, first of all, show you some alternative themes.
And this also demonstrates a very important Live Preview aspect of Excel 2013.
So click on the Page Layout tab and right over on the left in the Themes Group there
is a Themes button and at the bottom of the Themes button there’s a little drop down
arrow.
If I click on the little arrow and I can see a list of available themes.
Now there are several there.
There are about 20.
But there are also facilities to browse for additional themes on the Microsoft website.
We’ll have a look at that in just a moment.
Let’s stick with the ones that we get with Excel 2013.
Now if I hover over one of those icons in the gallery above where the cursor is now
I will get a preview of how this calendar would look if I used one of those themes.
And you’ll notice that each of the themes has a name.
So I’m going to start with the Office Theme and as I hover over the Office Theme I want
you to look at the affect on the calendar.
Now I’m hovered over the Office Theme.
You can see the screen tip there saying Office and you can see the change in the colors of
the calendar.
Now loosely speaking the calendar has day of the week headings: S, M, T, W, T, F, S.
It has the contents of the calendar itself, that’s the day numbers from 1 up to 28 to
30/31 depending on the month.
And then each of those numbers and letters has a particular font.
Now let me hover over one or two of the other themes so that you can see what changes.
Let’s go from Office to Facet.
Notice how the colors change.
In fact, the font changes as well.
That may be a little more difficult for you to see.
But let’s try Integral and then let’s go down to that one.
Again, you could probably more easily see here the change in font.
And each of these themes has not only its own color scheme but also its own fonts.
So at the top level we have the theme and by default with a new workbook, Excel 2013
applies the Office Theme.
So that’s the one you get by default.
And it’s up to you whether you change the theme.
Now the next thing I want to demonstrate is what happens with a new workbook.
As I said before, a new workbook when you create it gets the default Office Theme.
There’s a new workbook.
I’ve just put a little bit of content there, the word Hello there and then three numbers.
Go to the Page Layout tab, click on Themes.
Office is the default Theme.
You can see it selected there.
Now look at the words Hello there and the numbers as I hover over other themes.
Facet.
Now you notice how the font changes.
There is no color on that sheet at the moment.
So none of the colors are changing but you can more clearly see how the font changes
depending on the theme.
Now until I click on a theme it doesn’t get applied to the workbook.
So I’m still using Office but I’m doing live preview on the others.
The reason that there are no color changes is that I haven’t yet used the second level
of formatting in Excel 2013.
We’ve seen how a theme can apply in this case to a whole workbook, but we can also
decide at the next level down that certain cells or groups of cells have what are called
Cell Styles.
So let’s look at cell styles next.
So what I’m going to do first is to select the cell that says Hello there and then on
the Home tab in the Styles Group there is a command, Cell Styles.
And if I click on the drop down, I see a list of available cell styles.
Now the cell styles are in a number of groups and I’m not going to go through all of the
groups now but we’ll look at them a little bit later on.
We have Titles and Headings Group where we basically can structure the contents of a
worksheet or a whole workbook according to heading levels, much as you would say in a
Word Process Document.
So you could, for instance, decide that the Hello there field is actually a Heading Level
1 or a Heading Level 2 or a Heading Level 3.
Let’s suppose it’s a Heading 2.
So if I click on Heading 2, it becomes a Heading Level 2 entry in my worksheet.
Now let’s try the 1 next.
And with the 1 let’s go into Cell Styles.
Let’s say that’s going to take one of the Good, Bad, or Neutral Styles.
So let’s say 1 is Bad, 2 is Good, and 3 is Neutral.
Now, that means that all four of those cells have a cell style.
And what happens with the cell style will depend on which theme we have.
So if I structure my worksheet like that and then go back into Page Layout, Themes; still
on the Office Theme.
So now see what happens as I try the other themes.
Let’s try to the Facet Theme.
Look at those four cells.
With the Facet Theme the coloring stays the same on 1, 2, and 3, but notice how with Hello
there the coloring on the underline and the size of the font, the font itself changed.
Let’s try Integral.
Again, font change, size change, coloring of the underline in the Heading 2 field changes.
Now as I go through and preview the other themes, you can see the affect on each of
those.
Now what you can see if you look at the 1, 2, and 3, for example, the coloring in the
background does not change but of course the fonts and the size of the numbers in the fonts
does change depending on the selected theme.
So when you create a workbook it gets the default theme, you can change the theme to
any of the available themes if you want to.
If in a workbook on a particular worksheet you assign a cell style to one or more cells,
then how those cells appear will depend on the style you apply and that in turn depends
on the theme that you have applied.
If you use cell styles extensively, then it makes it much easier to change the overall
look and feel of a particular workbook because as you change the theme many or most or all
of the elements within the workbook will change their style accordingly.
This is also particularly helpful if you’re trying to match a theme in another document,
for instance a PowerPoint presentation or a Word document, because the themes in Office
2013 are common across the various components of the Office Suite.
Now that’s the first two levels, Theme and Cell Style.
The third level is direct formatting because you can completely avoid, you can make something
completely independent of the theme if you want to.
And what I’ve done here is I’ve merged three cells into one.
I’ve typed in there direct formatting and I’m going to directly format this cell and
just demonstrate that a change of theme makes no change to it whatsoever.
Now the first thing I’m going to do with this cell selected is to change the font.
So I go to the Home tab, drop down for the font.
I’m going to go for the Algerian Font and I’m then going to fill in the background
color.
Now we haven’t looked at filling color at the moment.
We’re coming back to that in a couple of sections time, but I’m just going to briefly
show you how to do this.
There is a button here, Fill Color, with a drop down.
Click on the drop down.
This drop down is one we’ll look at in detail later.
But the most important thing here in terms of what we’re doing at the moment is that
the drop down is divided into two groups: Theme Colors and Standard Colors.
Now Theme Colors are ones that change with the theme.
So if I chose one of these colors to fill that in with it would change with the theme.
If I choose a Standard Color, it will be independent of the theme.
So I’m just going to put in that color.
Now watch what happens if I go back to the Page Layout tab, click on the Themes drop
down.
I’ve currently got the Office Theme.
Watch the direct formatting cells as I change or I preview changes to the theme.
Now although it hops about a bit because of changes in size elsewhere the cells, the three
merged cells together, the background doesn’t change, the color doesn’t change, the font
doesn’t change, the size of the font doesn’t change.
It stays exactly the same whatever I do even though everything else changes; nothing about
those changes other than its position, of course.
So that’s the third level, that’s how you make a cell or some cells independent
of the theme.
Now just one other thing to mention about themes before we move on.
I mentioned this much earlier on.
If you search online and particularly if you go to Microsoft.com, there are available a
number of additional themes.
They come in a file which normally has an extension of THMX and if you download those
and store those on your device when you come to apply a theme as we saw earlier on Themes,
browse for themes, having downloaded one or more THMX files all ready, Browse to that
location, open one of the THMX files, and you can use one of those themes that you’ve
downloaded from elsewhere.
There are commercial sites that offer these themes and provided you could make sure that
the one that you’re looking at is a reputable service, it gives you another way of getting
different themes from outside of Excel 2013 Standard Themes.
And as I mentioned just now you can in fact create and save your own themes as well if
you want to.
So that’s Themes and Styles for now.
Let’s get started on formatting a worksheet or two.
I’ll see you
in
the next section.