Wednesday, June 29th, 2011

DIY Color Changing Clip Art

edit clip art original DIY Color Changing Clip Art

Much of the illustration Clip Art in the Microsoft Clip Organizer can be edited by changing its colors. By doing this you can not only recolor the art to match the look of your document but, if you use Theme colors then the art will change color when the Theme or Color scheme changes.

Now you won’t need information technology degrees to learn this – but maybe you’ll be so good at it, you just might consider graphic design college.

So, let’s see how the recoloring is done. First select the Clip Art and from the Picture Tools -> Format tab click the Group > Ungroup button. Answer Yes if you are prompted to convert the image to a Microsoft Office Drawing Object. In some applications  such as Publisher you’ll need to repeat the process and select Ungroup again.

edit clip art 1 DIY Color Changing Clip Art

Now click on individual parts of the object and either remove them or recolor them by selecting a Shape Fill Color from the Drawing Tools > Format tab. If you use Theme colors then the colors will change later on when the theme changes.

edit clip art 2 DIY Color Changing Clip Art

When you are done and you have recolored all the pieces you want to recolor, select all the pieces, right click and choose Group.

edit clip art 3 DIY Color Changing Clip Art

Change the document theme or Color Scheme to see the image change color to match the look of the theme.

edit clip art 4 DIY Color Changing Clip Art

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

Color your world in Word 2007

Let’s face it, plain old white backgrounds are, just that, plain old white backgrounds. If you’re like me, you’ll want to change the color of your page background.

To do this, choose the Page Layout tab from the Word 2007 Ribbon, and choose the Page Color dropdown list and choose a page color from it. If you choose a color from a Theme set then, later, when you change the Theme – the page color changes accordingly.

Friday, June 8th, 2007

What’s your fancy? It’s Oriel for me…

deftheme 770783 Whats your fancy? Its Oriel for me...

The new PowerPoint 2007 is just wonderful! It really makes the task of creating a presentation easy and fun. Pity you can’t say that for the task of sitting through most of them!

If you don’t like the Office Theme which is the default, you can easily make any theme your own. Open the Theme gallery on the Design tab and right click the theme of your choice, choose Save As Default Theme and every time you start PowerPoint that’s what you’ll see. Neat huh?

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Excel 2007 goes total color!

It’s always been confusing to me and my readers why you have an unlimited number of colors to choose from in Word but only a handful of really ugly colors to use in Excel. It doesn’t make sense – do Word users have better design skills than Excel uses – do they think that those of us who create worksheets somehow won’t be blindsided by how ugly the color combinations we’re being served up are?

Well, if you’ve been hankering after a rich color palette for your worksheets, you need do so no more. Excel 2007 gives you access to a full range of 16 million colors from the colors dialog so that you can use these colors, for example, for formatting text, charts or drawn objects. You can also select a Theme which gives you instant access to colors that are selected from the same monochromatic group and guaranteed to look great together. The new and very colorful options in Excel 2007 are guaranteed to wow you!