How to create custom color palette for a PowerPoint theme?

Using a consistent color palette throughout your PowerPoint presentation makes it look more polished. Although many organizations already have a defined set of brand aligned colors to use in presentations, the following is a quick tutorial if you need to set up the PowerPoint color palette.

Some useful background about themes and templates in PowerPoint: PowerPoint calls the defined set of colors for a presentation a ‘Theme’.  However, if you look for Themes on the design tab, you will see a series of slides which imply that ‘Themes’ include templates and layouts.  They don’t.  Themes, and layouts are used in Templates.

A PowerPoint template is composed of a powerpoint color theme plus slide layouts and potentially some images and starter content. Any PowerPoint presentation that used a template holds an instance of the color theme and layout from the template, but it is not linked back to the template. This means you can change the PowerPoint color theme in a single presentation, or you can change the color theme by updating a template file.

Back to creating and updating PowerPoint color palettes! First step is to decide which colors you want to use.  If your company has a Marketing team, they probably have a branding document which specifies the colors and fonts you should use.   If you need to add accent colors (or you do not have a Marketing team), there are a lot of online resources that can help you with selecting colors that work well together. The Adobe color wheel is a helpful resource – perfect for identifying complementary colors: https://color.adobe.com/create/color-wheel.

Once you have selected your presentation colors, you’re ready to build the custom color palette for your PowerPoint theme.

Navigate to the View tab on the PowerPoint ribbon and open the Slide Master. Click the ‘Colors’ dropdown menu. You will see pre-defined color palettes. At the end of the list is an option to Customize Colors.

Click on Customize Colors and the ‘Create New Theme Colors’ box will open

The ‘Create New Theme Colors’ box has a list of Background and Accent colors.

• Text/Background – Dark and Light 1 and 2 are the background and text colors to use if you are using colored backgrounds in your PowerPoint presentation. You can also use black and white.
• Accent 1 will be the default color when you draw lines and shapes in your PowerPoint presentation.  
• Accent 2-6 are the 5 colors from your color palette – the main colors you want to use in your PowerPoint presentations.

You can also choose your PowerPoint Hyperlink colors – common practice is to select a darker color for the Hyperlink, and a lighter one for a ‘Followed Hyperlink’ .

Click the dropdown arrow next to each color to choose your custom colors.

If your required color does not display in the preview, click ‘More Colors…’ to reveal additional options

You can choose colors from the Standard colors, but for greater accuracy and options select the ‘Custom’ tab and enter RGB or Hex attributes to select specific colors.

Repeat this process for each of the Accent, background/ text and hyperlink colors.  At the bottom of the ‘Create New Theme Colors’ box, enter a name for your PowerPoint color palette.

Hit ‘Save’ and you’re done!  Your current PowerPoint presentation will automatically update to use the attributes of your new color palette. If you’re using PPT Productivity Power Tools, the top set of colors on your Color Toolbar will update accordingly (making it easy to use your theme colors throughout your presentation). You can use your new color palette in any presentation by navigating to the Master Slide and selecting it from the ‘Colors’ drop down

Can I add more colors to my PowerPoint theme?

PowerPoint limits the number of presentation colors in PowerPoint Themes to:

• 6 accent colors,
• 4 text colors that can be used with dark and light backgrounds (2 dark and 2 light); and
• 2 hyperlink colors (one for unfollowed and one for followed)

However if your organization has an extended color palette that you want to be able to easily access when creating PowerPoint presentations, you can add these to your PPT Productivity Color Palette Toolbar. This will make the colors available for easy use each time you open PowerPoint. You can also share your extended color palette with team members (if they are also using PPT Productivity). And you can add custom color names to your colors.

Can I update Slide Library shapes to match the color of my themes?

We have created the PPT Productivity downloadable slides, shapes and icons in the Slide Library for PowerPoint, to automatically ‘inherit theme colors’.  This means irrespective of the thumbnail color of the shape in the library, when you paste one of our preset shapes or slides into your document, it will adopt the template colors.  If you need to update any of your custom shapes in your personal gallery to work this way, simply paste them onto your presentation, change the color using your theme colors – i.e. the colors that are in your templates color palette – and re-save the shape to your personal library.

Can I edit the colors of my PowerPoint theme?

Trying to work out how to change theme colors in PowerPoint? You can change one or all of the colors in your PowerPoint template. If you update the PowerPoint template to change colors, then the new colors will appear each time you subsequently use the template. To do this, you first need to open the actual PowerPoint template which is a .potx file. Opening .potx files is different to opening standard PowerPoint files when you want to edit the template. You do this by right-clicking on the .potx file in the File Navigator and selecting to Open (rather than 'New' which launches a blank presentation file using the template).

Once you have opened your .potx file, navigate to the Slide Master tab on the PowerPoint ribbon. Click the ‘Colors’ dropdown menu. You will see pre-defined color palettes. At the end of the list is an option to Customize Colors.

Click on Customize Colors and the ‘Create New Theme Colors’ box will open. From this view you can change any of the theme colors for your .potx template file.

How to change color of hyperlink in PowerPoint?

The PowerPoint hyperlink color for followed and unfollowed hyperlinks are determined by your template theme colors (hyperlinks are typically added to your presentation in one font color and then change to the other follower after they have been clicked). To change hyperlink colors in PowerPoint, follow the steps above to get to the Customize colors menu. Note that you can do this either from your current presentation, or you can update your template if you want to change the hyperlink color for your template. Refer back to the sections above for how to open the Popup to edit Theme Colors in a presentation or in a template file.

Note that there are two hyperlink colors, which allows you to separately change the hyperlink color that appears when creating a PowerPoint presentation as well as change the hyperlink color for a followed hyperlink in PowerPoint (followed hyperlink in PowerPoint refers to the color how the hyperlink will display after a reader has clicked on it). You can also update both the Hyperlink and Followed Hyperlink colors so that they are the same. Refer to the screenshot below for the location of the Hyperlink and Followed Hyperlink colors in PowerPoint.

Visit our PowerPoint Tips blog page to find more tutorial information.

We hope you found this overview helpful. If you're looking for a timesaving PowerPoint add-in, please download the PPT Productivity free trial or reach out to our team and request a walkthrough.

Please note: All instructions provided in our tutorial articles are based on PowerPoint for Windows 365 and are current at time of publishing.