Word 2007 Theme effects

[MikeS]

Making changes to the effects for a theme seems to do absolutely nothing.
Applying themes in general seems to do nothing. Am I missing something?

 

[Tony Jollans]

What effects do you have in your document that you are expecting to change?

More generally, if changing Themes does nothing at all, I suspect you do not
have, or are not using, Styles set to use Themes.

 

[MikeS]

To answer your question, I had some SmartArt, some WordArt and a Chart. I
also expected some background changes.

I did find out that I had not saved my document yet and once I saved it as a
2007 DOCX, things worked better but not the WordArt or the background.

I'm not following your comment about Styles and Themes. Styles are on the
Home tab and Themes are on the Page Layout tab. What does one have to do
with the other?

 

[Tony Jollans]

A Theme stands beside a Document and elements from the Theme can be used to
format elements in the Document either in Styles or in direct formatting
(for example look at the Font Color Button - the matrix at the top of the
dropdown shows Theme colours, the options below show non-Theme options). If
you use Theme elements they become references to Theme elements and will
change when you change the Theme; if you use non-Theme elements they are
fixed formatting that do not use Themes and won't change.

Off the top of my head I'm not sure what Theme Effects affect - not much in
Word, I think, they are more relevant in PowerPoint.

 

[MikeS]

Thanks! That makes more sense now to me. If I want something to change with
themes, I have to make sure the fill color is from a theme.

Still bothered with theme effects, though. It just doesn't seem to have
much effect on anything whether in Word or in PowerPoint.

 

[Tony Jollans]

Theme Effects should affect SmartArt, and, I think, Charts, but not WordArt,
and I'm not clear on how much of them do anything outside PowerPoint. The
effects are generally small - and may depend on the Theme in use. I do tend
to agree with you that they don't really seem worth the effort - maybe
custom effects can be better but you can't create them from within Office.

--
Enjoy,
Tony

www.WordArticles.com

Thanks! That makes more sense now to me. If I want something to change
with
themes, I have to make sure the fill color is from a theme.

Still bothered with theme effects, though. It just doesn't seem to have
much effect on anything whether in Word or in PowerPoint.

 

[Ted M H]

I did a bit of testing on this question and here's what I've found so far:

To see a theme effect on a smart art object, insert the object into your
Word docx and do NOT apply any direct formatting to it.
With the smart art object selected, go to the design tab and in the Smart
Art styles gallery click on a style that has some effects, such as the one
named Moderate Effect.
Now go back to the page layout tab and try different theme effects from the
theme effects gallery. You should see significant differences between the
effect choices now.
As far as I can tell Theme Effects have no effect on Shapes, Wordart or
other objects. Also, if you apply any direct formatting to a smart art
object rather than applying a style from the gallery, theme effects are
basically disabled for that object. I think the reason that most people see
almost no changes to smart art objects when they change the theme effects is
because they are using the default smart art style-simple fill-which has
almost no effects to change.