Colors

Macabacus' Recolor dialog, accessed via the Macabacus > Color Tools > Recolor button, is essentially a find-and-replace tool for colors in a presentation. You can swap colors in an entire presentation, a single slide, or a single shape, specifying whether you want to replace the font, fill, and/or border/line colors. Macabacus can even swap colors in slide masters, custom layouts, charts, tables, and SmartArt. Macabacus cannot swap colors in pictures or embedded objects.

Recoloring replaces theme colors with RGB colors that are fixed and do not change with themes (similar to the Freeze Colors tool). Keep this in mind if you rely on the ability to change themes.

Disconnect colors from their native PowerPoint themes by converting theme colors to RGB colors throughout an entire presentation, or just within a selection. This prevents undesirable and unexpected color changes when changing themes, copying and pasting between presentations using different themes, or inserting content from a Macabacus library. Access this tool from the Macabacus > Color Tools > Freeze Colors menu.

Before using the Freeze Colors tool, you can visualize how colors will change in your presentation when different themes are applied by mousing over themes or color variants on the native Design tab (PowerPoint 2013 and 2016) if you have Live Preview enabled. After using the Freeze Colors tool, you will observe that your colors no longer change as you mouse over these options.

PowerPoint users often adjust the transparency properties of shapes in order to create lighter shades of darker colors. This is poor practice, since semi-transparent colors often reduce PDF and print quality, take longer to load on screen (particularly on mobile devices), and inflate file size. Click the Macabacus > Color Tools > Fix Transparent Fill button to replace semi-transparent colors in selected shapes with a solid, lighter color that appears identical to the semi-transparent color.

In grayscale or black and white views, or in presentations printed in black and white, colors within shapes can sometimes appear too dark or too light. Click the Macabacus > Color Tools > Fix Grayscale button to correct the grayscale appearance for all shapes in a presentation prior to printing in black and white.

_{This documentation refers to the latest Macabacus version. Some features and descriptions of these features may not apply to older versions of Macabacus. Update your Macabacus software to take advantage of the latest features.}