PowerPoint 2011 for Mac provides plenty of options to style your slide backgrounds. Our earlier Format Slide Background tutorial provided a generic idea about changing the slide background to some of the available options such as a solid color, a gradient, a texture or a picture, or even one of PowerPoint's built-in patterns. In this and other upcoming tutorials, you will learn how to choose these different types of background fill options. We begin this series with a tutorial that will show you how to choose solid fills for your slide background. A solid fill is essentially one color filling the entire slide area, as in a black, blue, or white slide, or a slide with any other color. Follow these steps to learn more:
- We assume you have created a new presentation, or you have opened one of your existing presentations. We also assume that you have already summoned the Format Background dialog box, as explained in the aforementioned
Format Slide Background tutorial. Alternatively, just right-click on an empty area of your slide, and choose the Format Background option in the resultant contextual menu to bring up the Format Background dialog box.
- Within the Format Background dialog box, make sure that the Fill option is active in the sidebar. Then, select the Solid tab, as shown highlighted in red within Figure 1.
Figure 1: Solid tab selected within the Format Background dialog box - Click the Color button (highlighted in blue within Figure 1, above) to open the Color drop-down gallery shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Color drop-down gallery within the Format Background dialog box - The options within the Color drop-down gallery are explained below as marked in Figure 2, above. Choose any one of these options for the Solid Background fill:
A. Automatic
- Uses the default background color of the Theme applied to the presentation.
B. Theme Colors
- Here, you can select any of the colors which are from the active Theme of the presentation. You can also select any of the 5 tints (lighter color variations) and shades (darker color variations) for any Theme color.
C. Standard Colors
- Here you can choose from any of the ten standard colors. These ten standard colors are just choices of colors that PowerPoint believes to be widely used. You don't have to limit yourself to either the Theme colors or Standard colors, as you will learn in the next two options. Note that it's a good design idea to use Theme colors as far as possible.
D. Recent Colors
- Here, you can find the colors most recently used. If you have just launched PowerPoint and created a new presentation, this option may be entirely absent since you haven't selected any color recently!
E. More Colors
- This option is to summon the Colors dialog box, which helps you to create your own new color to use as a background fill. To learn more about how to work with the More Colors option, read our Add Solid Fills to Shapes tutorial. Explore Step 4-E in that tutorial.
- Choose any of the options as explained in the preceding step. Thereafter, apply the selected solid color fill to your slides by clicking either:
- The Apply button to fill selected slides in the presentation with the selected color. If you don't have multiple slides selected, the solid color will be applied to the active slide only.
- The Apply to All button to fill all slides in the presentation with the selected color.
- More details about the Apply and Apply to All buttons can be found in our Format Slide Background tutorial.
- In Figure 3 below, you can see the slide background of the entire presentation is filled with pink color.
Figure 3: Slide background of entire presentation changed to solid fill - Remember to save your presentation often.
