What is the set of colors fonts and effects that determines the overall look of your presentation?

What is a PowerPoint theme?

What is a PowerPoint template?

A template is a theme plus some content for a specific purpose—such as a sales presentation, a business plan, or a classroom lesson.

So a template has design elements that work together (colors, fonts, backgrounds, effects) along with sample slides and boilerplate content that you augment to tell your story.

You can create your own custom templates and store them, reuse them, and share them with others. See Create and save a PowerPoint template.

You can also find hundreds of different types of free templates for PowerPoint that you can apply to your presentation:

  Get pre-built PowerPoint templates at templates.office.com  

Templates.Office.com also has templates for other Office apps. Here are some examples of the free templates available there:

Here is an example of a one-slide template for an award certificate:

A template like this can include:

1 Subject-specific content, such as "Certificate of Achievement," "Soccer," and the soccer ball image. Generally this text or content is only editable from the slide master.

2 Background formatting, such as pictures, texture, gradient or solid fill color, and transparency. This example shows the light blue solid fill background.

3 Color, fonts, effects (3-D, lines, fills, shadows, etc.), and theme design elements (such as the color and gradient effects inside the word Soccer).

4 Text placeholders that allow people to enter unique information to customize the slide for their needs, such as "Player's name," "Name of coach," "Date of presentation," and any variable, such as the year.

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See Also

Download free, pre-built templates

Create your own theme in PowerPoint

Create and save a PowerPoint template