Office Themes: Getting Documents To Sing One (Beautiful) Song.
A big part of the Office 12 user interface story is how fast you can create a great looking document. This is the first in a series of articles from Microsoft explaining how we fill up Office 12s galleries with great looking choices.
Office 12 dramatically improves the aesthetic quality of formatting and this becomes really clear when you look at documents created with previous versions. In our research we looked at a lot of customer documents and for the most part they are professional looking but quite plain, relying on the default styles for text, tables and graphics. Obviously, PowerPoint with its Design Templates has the most colorful and graphically rich documents. But, even so, the tables, charts and diagrams on those slides usually arent as polished as background on which they sit.
Office Themes are an entirely new way to specify the colors, fonts and graphic effects to be used in a single document.

The Office 12 Ribbon uses this design description to provide galleries of Quick Styles that always match the Theme of your document. The Themes and the Quick Styles are created by visual designers.


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Source: Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog