If you need to create a visual presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, consider using a theme to bring life to your slides and give the presentation a really professional look. You can apply a theme to a blank PowerPoint document or to an existing presentation. I'm just going to start with a blank template to demonstrate.

First, you need to select the design tan in the top navigation. Here, you will all sorts of options for themes at the top of the screen. You can also open the drop down menu for the themes grouped to see even more.

But it’s a little hard to see the preview when the menu is open, so I'm going to click back out of there to close it. When you hover your curser over any of the themes here at the top, you can see a preview in your slide. You can see that the theme changes different design elements, like the background color, the fonts and where the text is placed.

I'm going to go with this theme which is pretty groovy. When you apply a theme to a single blank slide, PowerPoint will assume that’s the title slide. You can add additional slides to your presentation by clicking on the home tab and choosing new slide. In the menu here, PowerPoint gives you nine different types of slides to choose from. You might want something that lets you create a title above your content, you might want something that lets you have two columns of content or lets you drop in a picture. Just click on the one that suites your purposes. You will see that when you use a theme, each of the different slide types coordinates with the theme that you choose.

Now, let’s say you like the theme overall, but you don’t like the color scheme. If we go back to the design tab, the themes group gives us the option to change the color. Just click on the colors button to open the whole menu of built in color schemes. And again, you can hover your cursor over anyone of the palettes to get a preview in your slide. When you select one, you will see in the slide thumbnails on the left that the palette is applied to all the slides in your PowerPoint.

If you really want to play graphic designer, you can even customize the color palette. Just open the theme colors in the drop down menu and at the bottom of the list, select create new theme colors. You’ll get a dialog box where you can select the specific color you like for each of the 12 slots. If you make any changes here, you can name your customized color palette and save it. Your own custom color theme will be included in the themes gallery. But I'm going to leave the color scheme as it is for now.

You can do the same thing with fonts. If you want to change the look of your slides, just select the fonts button from the themes group and hover your cursor over the different selections in the fonts list to find a style that you like. And just like with the colors, you can also create your own font theme by mixing and matching heading and body fonts. I'm going to set it with a really bold heading font, like Impact. Then, I’ll name the font style, and save it to the theme. You can see that the thumbnail up here in the themes gallery reflects the font change that I just made.

The last thing you can do with your theme is to change some of the design effect. But you can’t do any customization here, you just have to make do with 20 pretty incredible options that PowerPoint has to offer. Since I don’t have any shapes or tables or graphics in my presentation yet, I can’t really preview what the different effects look like, but I can always go back and select one later.

Finally, when you are all done customizing your theme, click on the arrow to open the full themes gallery again and down at the bottom, chose save current theme. Now, when you give your theme a name and click save, the theme will be available in the gallery for future projects.