Office 2016 for Mac has quite different and extensible color selection options for text, shapes, pages etc. That are the envy of Office for Windows. Choose from the same range of colors as Windows, but in many different ways. All these additional features in Office for Mac are from Apple’s macOS operating system, not Microsoft. Our look at the options is from macOS Sierra v10.12.6 but the same or similar applies to recent versions of macOS.
Mar 30, 2017 - Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac, Microsoft's latest Office suite for Mac allows you to personalize the Office Theme between two different options.
These color selectors apply to Office 2016 for Mac, Word for Mac, Excel for Mac, PowerPoint for Mac and Outlook for Mac. The main color menu on the Home tab is the same as Office for Windows. Theme and standard colors plus a gradient selector. Recent Colors Once you’ve selected a color, it will appear on the main selector under ‘Recent Colors. More Colors Choose ‘More colors’ and there’s five different tabs to choose from; Color Wheel, Color Sliders, Color Palettes, Image Palettes and Pencils.
Exactly what you see in ‘More Colors’ depends on the version of macOS, we’re using Sierra 10.12.5 Eyedropper color selection from screen All the tabs have the place for the ‘eyedropper’. This lets you magnify any part of the screen and select a visible color. Click on the ‘dropper’ then move about the screen. Very handy for matching the color from an image or logo. Swatch Drawer The empty boxes at the bottom are called the Swatch Drawer. You can make your own collection of preferred colors.
Drag a color from the large swatch at left or any color on the main part of the color selector. Color Wheel If your color wheel is all black, like ours was when we first looked at it, drag the slider to the left. Click inside the circle to choose a color then move the slider for the shading. Color Sliders This is where you can enter RGB, CMYK or HSB color values.
Color Palettes Apple supplies various color palettes or color selections. Apple and Web Safe Colors are fairly standard but Crayons has a nice selections of shades. You can add your own palettes or share them with others. Look under the ‘cog’ icon. Image Palettes This option is very interesting though it doesn’t look like much.
Click on the cog icon and you can import any image on your Mac or use an image in the clipboard. Once imported, you can click anywhere on the image to select that color. Really useful for color matching logos or products images. Pencils Choose colors from a pencil box. As you hover over each pencil it ‘pops up’ and the name appears at the top.
Plugins The macOS system allows for extensions to the color selector. Search online to find plugins, though many have been withdrawn, partly because they’ve been superseded by changes in the system tabs. Is just one example. It adds related color ‘swatches’ that you can choose from. More Go to for more detail on the Apple color selectors, palettes and how to use them.
Background: Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, OS X 10.7.4, MacBookPro5,1 I desperately want to change the theme fonts and colors to take advantage of the interface advantages of having these elements at the top of every menu and preloaded into styles. However I can't figure out how to do it. Every single resource I've found on the internet shows me how to change to another Microsoft-designed theme, usually hinting that it's possible to create a custom theme but not saying how or even where to look. It's infuriating. The Theme Colors menu in Powerpoint (which in Word is inexplicably only visible in Publisher view, argh!) has a link fixed at the bottom of the link that says 'Create Theme Colors' but for some reason this link isn't to be found in Word.
And in Word and Powerpoint both there's no such link for fonts. Would somebody please tell me how to do this one thing that in my opinion is absolutely crucial to using this seemingly central feature of one of the most often used professional computer programs in existence? While MS Theme Builder seems to solve the problem, I could not find a version for OS X using the links provided.
To avoid having to run Theme Builder in a virtual machine, it is also possible to create custom theme font definitions by doing some very simple XML file editing. By googling, I found several articles describing the procedure, e.g. This one: You basically copy an XML file defining one of the built-in theme font packages to a user folder (if you have redefined your user template location, you should copy the XML file to your custom location, not the location under /Library/Application Support/ specified in the article), and then you edit the XML file to change the font names. (There is also a text that needs to be changed in order to match the file name.) I can confirm that it works in Word 2011.
Word needs to be restarted for any additions or changes to take effect. The same procedure is supposed to work for colors (the folder locations are adjacent), although I have not tried it. I created a new color theme in PowerPoint ('Create Theme Colors' in the Colors drop-down list) and then save the theme as a.thmx file in the myUsername Library Application Support Microsoft Office User Templates My Themes Theme Colors folder and then in Word I was able to click on 'Browse Themes' in the Themes Drop-down and find my custom.thmx file to load. That worked for loading the colors, but I have yet to figure out how to load a custom font theme. Kind of a hassle to have to do it through PowerPoint, but at least it works.