Where to save your Office 2007 themes

Installed themes

When you install Office 2007, a set of default themes is installed to this folder on both Windows Vista and Windows XP:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Document Themes 12.

The installed themes show up in the "Built-in" section of the Themes gallery on the Design tab of the Ribbon.

You cannot, for all practical purposes, add other themes to this folder. If you do, they are automatically renamed to the default theme names in the application interfaces, which is generally pretty useless.

Custom themes

If you want your own themes to show up on the Custom area of the Themes gallery on the Design tab of the Ribbon, put them here:

(in Windows Vista) C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

(in Windows XP) C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

Custom themes and 
Office Button | New

If you want your themes to show up in My Templates when you go to Office Button | New, then put them here:

(in Windows Vista) C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\

(in Windows XP) C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\

Here's the My Templates dialog box:

And here's the folder where I stored them:

Additional font themes, colors, and effects

Each theme (.THMX file extension) includes one color scheme, one font set, and one effects scheme. You can edit the color scheme and font set in the PowerPoint interface and save the theme. The new color scheme and font set will travel with the theme.

If you create more than one new color scheme or font set in the PowerPoint interface and expect them to be included with the theme when you save it, you will be unpleasantly surprised. These additional schemes will not travel with the theme; they will only be available on your computer. 

If you want these additional color schemes to "travel" with the theme, you must add the color scheme by editing the XML manually. See instructions on this page to add color schemes to a theme.

If you just want to make color schemes, font sets, or effect schemes available to other users, you can give them an XML file with just those specifications. 

In the image below, you can see XML files for two color schemes: Currency and Custom 1.

And here's how they show up in the Colors dropdown on the Design tab of the Ribbon:

To have a color scheme always available in this manner, have the user paste the appropriate XML file into the Theme Colors, Theme Effects, or Theme Fonts folder inside these folders: 

(in Windows Vista) C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

(in Windows XP) C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

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