The PODA Blog

Microsoft PowerPoint is widely used for presentations, documentation, course materials … really for just about anything that you want to share professionally or personally. While you can add all kinds of effects to a presentation, the colours that you choose are important to the overall aesthetics. 

I got to thinking about Windows colour schemes for system colours, and how similar shades could be used.  PowerPoint already provides colours for text, lines and arrows, and shape ”fill” or background, but to achieve a variety of similar colours would be tough.

Shape Colour Selection

To set colours for a shape, select the shape with a right-click, and choose Format Autoshape. On the Colors and Lines page, you can drop down the colour selection to present a standard set as well as several choices for “Automatic” colour (shape default - up to 8 ) and up to 8 custom choices you have added. Click More Colors… to present a panel where you can choose a Standard colour or a Custom colour by moving a target within a the colour pallette.  Chosen colours are added to your custom choices, and will replace an existing choice if you already have 8 selected.

Custom Colour Series 

What has resulted is a PowerPoint addin (attached below) that will allow you to start with a 56-colour selection of standard colours and easily establish individual custom colours as well as your own “theme” based on a selected colour.

The addin makes use of dynamically generated text boxes on its userforms for the colour grid, with textbox functionality made available via class modules.  The sliders are set in the range 0 - 255 for the r,g,b value ranges, and there is liberal use of the RGB function.

Save the addin file, and start PowerPoint. Make sure that macro security is set to Medium. Use the main menu to add this addin into your session. (Tools | Addins | Add New… to navigate and select).

 

A new icon will appear on the formatting toolbar that shows red, green, and blue dropdowns. Click this icon to show the setup form used to show the initial 56-colours and the controls used to change these as well as define a colour series.

To replace a colour in the standard set, click on it, and use the red, green and blue sliders to vary its shade.  Click Set Single Colour when ready.

To define a colour series, select a standard colour, or use the sliders to arrive at one, and click Show Colour Series.  Use the Gradient Change Factor to increase the shading difference between colours. If you are happy with the colour series, click Set Colour Series.

The colours set in the series can be applied to shapes independently of built-in colours. Right-click on a shape to show the dropdown menu. A new menu item has been added - Custom Colour Series.  Click this to show the colour series selection dialog. Click on a colour to set the shape colour.

This dialog will remain in view until it’s closed, so colours may be set for as many shapes as needed - including from slide to slide. If a colour series has not been established, then the menu item will be Extended Colours rather than Custom Colour Series.

I hope to extend this to other PP objects before too long. In the meanwhile, hopefully some may find this useful.

Regards

Derek

Custom Colours PowerPoint Addin