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Themes Guide

Understand what a theme is, and how it can help you create beautiful looking templates quickly

Daniel Cooke avatar
Written by Daniel Cooke
Updated over a week ago

Before diving into how to use Templi's themes feature, it's important to understand the difference between themes and inline styling:

What is Inline Styling?

Inline styling refers to formatting that is applied directly to specific text or elements, such as:

  • Making a particular word bold or italic

  • Changing the color of a specific paragraph

  • Adjusting the size of certain text

  • Adding a border to one specific table

Inline styles override your theme settings but only for the specific elements where they're applied.

You apply inline styles by highlighting text, tables, lists and manually changing their appearance


What is a Theme?

A theme is a collection of predefined styles that apply to your entire document. It includes:

  • Font families and sizes for body text and headings

  • Color schemes for text, backgrounds, and accents

  • Table formatting (borders, cell padding, header styles)

  • List styles and spacing

Think of a theme as a "master blueprint" for your document's appearance. When you change a setting in your theme, it automatically updates all elements using that style throughout your document.

Why Themes Are Better Than Inline Styling

  • Consistency: Ensures all elements look uniform throughout your document

  • Efficiency: Change the appearance of multiple elements at once

  • Professionalism: Creates a polished, cohesive look

  • Maintainability: Easier to update documents as your branding evolves

  • Simplicity: Eliminates the need to remember specific font sizes or color codes

For financial advisors creating client-facing documents, using themes rather than inline styling results in more professional reports that maintain consistency and build client confidence.


Introduction to Themes

Themes in Templi allow you to create and apply consistent styling across your entire document. Instead of formatting each paragraph, table, and list individually, you can set up a theme once and have it automatically applied to all elements in your document. This guide will walk you through how to use this powerful feature.

Creating a New Theme

  1. Navigate to the Themes tab in the top menu

  2. Click Create New Theme

  3. Enter a name for your theme in the Name field

  4. Choose whether to make this your default theme by selecting Yes or No

    • Setting a theme as default will automatically apply it to all newly created documents

Customizing Your Theme

Base Theme Settings

Fonts

  1. Click on Fonts in the Base Theme section

  2. Select a Body Font from the dropdown (over 1,800 fonts available)

  3. Choose the font Weight (Regular, Bold, etc.) and Size

  4. Set Line height, Letter spacing, and Paragraph spacing

  5. Select text Alignment and Decoration options

  6. Choose text Case formatting

  7. Configure additional text styles for Title, Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3

Colors

  1. Click on Colors in the Base Theme section

  2. When you create a theme we automatically create these pre-defined colors, but you can remove and edit these if you wish:

    • Accent: For highlighting important elements

    • Primary: Main brand or document color

    • Text Body: Standard text color

    • Primary Dark: Darker version of your primary color

    • Text Heading: Color for headings and titles

    • Primary Light: Lighter version of your primary color

  3. Click Add Color to create additional custom colors

  4. Click on any color swatch to open the color picker with RGB, HEX, and HSL options

What are RGB, HEX and HSL?

They are color systems used by computers to represent any color you can imagine. You can simply copy and paste these values from Microsoft Word or use a Color picker browser extension to grab them from anywhere you wish

Element Styling

Tables

  • Click on Tables in the Elements section

  • Select Default Table Style to edit or click Add Table Style to create a new one

  • Configure table appearance:

    • Border Preset: Choose from options like All Borders, Outer Borders, etc.

    • Border Style: Select Solid, Dashed, etc.

    • Border Width: Set the thickness of table borders

    • Border Color: Choose a color for table borders

    • Cell Padding: Set spacing inside cells

      • Click "Individual" to customise the padding more precisely (left padding, top padding, right padding, bottom padding)

  • Customize Row Styles for specific rows:

    • First Row: Often used for headers

    • Inner Rows: For content rows

    • Last Row: For summary or footer rows

    • Even/Odd Rows: For alternating row colors

    • Custom Row: For specific row styling

  • Add Column Styles to format specific columns differently

    • First Column: Often used for label rows

    • Inner Columns: For content columns

    • Last Column: For summary columns

    • Even/Odd Columns: For alternating column colors

    • Custom Row: For specific column styling

Bullet Lists

  1. Click on Bullet Lists in the Elements section

  2. Customize the appearance of all bullet lists in your document

  3. Set different styling for various list levels

Using Your Themes

Applying a Theme to a Document

  1. Open your document or create a new one

  2. Go to the Themes tab in the top menu

  3. Click on the theme you want to apply from the available options

  4. Your document will immediately update with the new styling

Managing Multiple Themes

  • Create different themes for various types of documents (reports, fact finds, etc.)

  • Switch between themes by selecting them from the Themes tab

  • Update a theme by clicking the menu icon (three dots) next to its name and selecting Edit

Understanding "Revert to Theme"

The "Revert to Theme" function is a powerful tool that removes all inline styles and returns document elements to the current theme's styling. This feature can be quite important to understand, as it affects how your document appears.

Two Ways to Revert to Theme

1. Revert Selected Text

To revert only a portion of your document:

  1. Highlight the specific text you want to revert

  2. Go to the Home tab in the top menu

  3. Click Revert to Theme

  4. The selected text will lose any custom formatting and return to the theme's styling

2. Revert Entire Document

To revert your entire document at once:

  1. Go to the Themes tab in the top menu

  2. Click Revert to theme button on the right side

  3. All elements in your document will be reset to match the current theme

Important Warning

When you use "Revert to Theme," you will lose ALL inline styles that were applied outside of the theme settings. This includes:

  • Custom font sizes

  • Manually applied colors

  • Font family changes

  • Individual table formatting

  • Special text formatting (bold, italic, etc.)

  • Custom spacing

A warning message will appear to confirm that you want to proceed with this action. This is not reversible, so be certain before confirming.

When to Use "Revert to Theme"

  • When your document has inconsistent formatting that you want to clean up

  • After copying and pasting content from other sources that brought unwanted styles

  • When you want to start fresh with your theme's styling

  • When preparing a finalized document to ensure visual consistency

Microsoft Word Compatibility

  • Themes are preserved when exporting to Microsoft Word

  • Custom fonts will be maintained in Word exports

  • When importing Word documents, Templi will automatically create a theme based on the document's styling

Best Practices

  1. Start with a theme: Before adding content, set up your theme first

  2. Try to avoid inline styles: Use theme settings instead of applying formatting directly to text when possible

  3. Limit your color palette: Use 3-5 colors for a professional look

  4. Be consistent with fonts: Use no more than 2-3 different fonts in a document

  5. Create themed templates: Save documents with themes as templates for future use

  6. Test your exports: Check how your themed documents look when exported to Word

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