About themes
A theme is a set of unified design elements and color schemes. A theme helps you easily create professional and well-designed documents for viewing in Microsoft Word, in e-mail, or on the Web.
When you apply a theme to a document, Word customizes the following elements: link bars, background colors or graphics, body and heading styles, lists, horizontal lines, hyperlink colors, and table border colors. Both the single-level and the multiple-level lists are also customized.
To quickly change the appearance of these elements, you can change the theme.
Unlike a template, a theme does not provide AutoText entries, custom toolbars, macros, menu settings, or shortcut keys.
You can also select options to apply brighter colors to text and graphics, animate certain theme graphics, or apply a background to your document. To see the animation of theme graphics, view the Web page in a Web browser.