Sharing themes/colour schemes in Microsoft Office 2007/2010

[Steve]

Hi guys,

I'm about to punch Office in the face, so I thought I'd ask you guys how the hell to do this.

I have a colour scheme created in PowerPoint 2007. I've saved that scheme as a theme.

How do I transfer this over to another machine so that the colour scheme is available in the colour menu?

Source machine has office 2007 and destination has 2010.

Moreover, how will I then have this colour scheme available to me in Publisher?

I don't want to have to recreate the theme/colour scheme or have to bundle too many files together to share the theme/scheme between the people that will use it.

Thanks!

[Splash]

Pretty certain it's just a case of saving your theme on one machine, copying the theme file to your other machine and dumping it in the themes directory. Sadly as far as I'm aware the themes apply to Excel, Word and Powerpoint only.

At work we have a script that dumps the themes (our standard corporate templates) from a central location on each machine which is called at login by a GPO - that's probably the way forward.

EDIT - on top of that have some judicious KBage in case you need to check where your templates should sit based on your Office deployments. I assume you can launch regedit?

Office programs use two registry keys to record the user templates file location and the workgroup templates file location. Both settings are recorded in the following registry key:

Office 2007:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\General

Office 2010:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\General



The user templates location is stored in the
UserTemplates
string value.

The workgroup templates location is stored in the
SharedTemplates
string value.

These string values do not exist until you make a change to the default locations for your custom templates. By default, all Office programs look for their installed templates. Therefore, no string value is required for Office programs.

If you change the user templates file location to the default location as described in the "User templates file location" section, the
UserTemplates
string value is deleted from the registry. However, if you change the workgroup templates file location to the default location, the
SharedTemplates
string value is retained in the registry.