Office 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Customizing Documents with Themes, Templates, and Macros

Word power users do more than master what’s on the ribbon: They make Word their own by customizing documents with themes, templates, and macros. Themes give your documents a consistent look and sense of style, making sure you produce attractive, easy-to-read documents. Templates set up documents’ formatting so you don’t have to fuss with page layout, line spacing, paper orientation, and the like every time you create a new document. Many of the templates available in Word even include sample text that you can replace with your own, so you don’t have to worry about what goes where. And if themes and templates take the bother out of making your documents look good, macros helps you avoid mind-numbing drudgework by automating actions that you perform frequently.

Themes: The Way to Better Designs

Ever watch a three-year-old pick out her own clothes? She might choose a favorite orange-and-blue striped t-shirt to go with a flowered skirt in pinks and purples and a couple of mismatched knee socks. Cute, but you probably don’t want her to go to preschool dressed that way.

Thanks to Word’s themes, you don’t have to send your documents out into the world looking like a self-dressed toddler. A theme pulls your document together, giving it a unified look. Each theme is a predesigned, preformatted set of fonts, sizes, and colors, letting you create professional-looking documents without giving a thought to formatting. (Of course, ...