excel themes

By way of adding to my suggestion that you tread carefully: I asked AI (ClaudeAI, specifically) what Excel pros have to say about the benefits and drawbacks of Excel themes. Here's the response. Notice that there are more concerns listed than positive, especially if this is a workbook that you'll be sending to other people.

The Positive Case

Consistency & Branding: Excel MVPs like Mynda Treacy and other professionals praise themes for maintaining corporate branding with one click. For dashboards and reports, themes can ensure uniform colors, fonts, and effects across entire workbooks, which is valuable for professional presentations.

Efficiency: Professionals appreciate that themes can transform a workbook's appearance quickly rather than manually formatting elements one by one. Custom themes can be saved and reused across all Office applications.

The Major Concerns

Portability Problems: This is the big one. As one commenter corrected on Mynda Treacy's site: when you send a file with a custom theme to someone outside your organization, the colors will change to "something completely off" and Excel substitutes default fonts even if the recipient has the fonts installed. The theme file itself doesn't travel with the document for external recipients.

Style Proliferation: Mynda Treacy warns that "Styles can breed like mice when copied from workbook to workbook and can quickly multiply to plague levels" — a colorful caution about how styles can create maintenance nightmares.

Version Compatibility: Users report frustration when Excel updates change default themes unexpectedly, breaking color-dependent macros and requiring manual theme resets on each new file.

Limited Adoption: Multiple sources note that few people actually use themes despite their availability. As one tutorial states, "few people use themes to enhance their worksheets" because Excel users focus on data rather than aesthetics.

I've never used these, but I queried Excel Help and was  pointed to the Page Layout tool bar, where I see themes in the immediate left.

And when you click on it, this opens up

I'm doing this on a Mac, with Excel 16.107     If your issue is specifically finding the "Basis" theme and it's not there, THAT is a different issue.

Beyond that, I'm curious what you're wanting to do with a theme in the first place. I've used Excel a lot (over several decades) and have never come across these; and I'd be wary of using them anyway. If you want to create a good looking output sheet at the end of a bunch of analysis, that's one thing, but be careful about prettifying background database and processing sheets. Too much attention to looks can seriously interfere with reliable functionality.

idk if you'll see this cause its been like 7 years, but I am having the same issue, and neither of the links you sent works anymore :( Any chance you have another way to get the Basis theme?

bpfish5

Hi,

This issue is already discussed in this https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/missing-themes/6ad83734-5323-4be5-8ad0-351c7993ce54.

If that doesn't help, please download the file from the below temporary link and try to install it in Excel.

https://send.firefox.com/download/62c05e5ba7ea51de/#64ljPpD12SONK-2B8p1mlQ

Regards