Hey gang,

I want to share a neat tip with you for creating custom color tints and shades using PowerPoint.

Typically, a color palette begins with a single base color. Then, you broaden the range of that color with tints and shades to create your color palette. This template will help you quickly create those tints and shades.

For the most part, tints are made by adding white to the base color. The more white you add, the lighter you make your base. Shades, on the other hand, are created by adding black to your base color. The more black you add, the darker your base.

I set up this simple template in PowerPoint to help you create tints and shades from a single base color. Here's a quick overview of how the template works:

Can you take a look at this template, play around with it, and let me know what you think? I'm sure you’ll have some ways to make this even more usable, but I wanted to push this out to you guys and get your feedback.

Thanks!

19 Comments
Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro

David, I REALLY like this. I agree w/Katie that it provides incentive to upgrade to Office 2013, which has been sitting on my desk/To Do list since probably late 2012 (lazy, I know!). Also, though, in case others aren't aware of how easy it is to use, when using Storyline, to use its inbuilt color pick to grab colors from another program, here's how you can do it with PPT and SL 1. Launch PPT and SL. Set things up so you can see both programs, 2. In your SL slide insert a shape. 3. In SL, right-click the shape and choose format shape from the shortcut menu. 4. Click the drop-down by the word Color (near the little Fill icon) and choose More Colors 5. When the Colors window opens, click the Color Picker in the corner and then hover over the area/program that contains the color you... Expand

Rebecca Fleisch Cordeiro
David Anderson
Laura M