Word – How to add and save customized colours to ‘Theme Colors’, in Word

Create a table in Word and fill in all the necessary details. When done, highlight the table and set the outline of the table to be white. Steps below.

• Select table.

• Select Borders --> Borders and Shading

• Select the color to be white.

Should look like this. . .

This is what it looks like when you highlight the table. . .

For .docx documents, you can add via themes additional colors to the Office color-picker as a new section called "Custom Colors" :

This is how to do that :

• In Word, go to the Design pane
• Click the down-arrow below Themes
• Choose "Save Current Theme..."
• Give a name and save the .thmx file, say as mytheme.thmx
• Close Word
• Open the save folder, normally
  C:\Users\{USER}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes
• Copy your theme file elsewhere
• Rename the file to mytheme.thmx.zip
• Open the file and drill-down to theme, theme (again)
• Copy the file theme1.xml and open it in a text editor

• At the end of the file, just before the tag </a:theme>, add a a:custClrLst tag. Below is the text that produced the "Custom Colors" section in my above image :

  <a:custClrLst>
      <a:custClr name="Dark Blue">
      <a:srgbClr val="1F497D" />
      </a:custClr>
      <a:custClr name="Mint Green">
      <a:srgbClr val="99DB73" />
      </a:custClr>
      <a:custClr name="Girly Pink">
      <a:srgbClr val="FF99FF" />
      </a:custClr>
  </a:custClrLst>
  

• Save the theme1.xml and replace it in mytheme.thmx.zip

• Rename the mytheme.thmx.zip back to mytheme.thmx and replace it in its original folder
• Open Word. If the Custom Colors have not appeared, re-apply the template in the Design pane by clicking the down-arrow below Themes and re-assigning your template.

This new theme can be assigned to any Office document, not only Word.

References :

• PPT 2007 custom colors
  This contains a link to a modified THMX file that you can examine.
• XML Hacking: Custom Colors
• XML Hacking: An Introduction