Theme XML Files

by Geetesh Bajaj, August 11th 2008

If you followed my previous topic about saving a theme, you know that your saved theme has the THMX file extension. THMX actually stands for an Office Theme Document file -- but what it hides is more important in this case than what it stands for.

A THMX file -- and any of the new file formats that Office 2007 and later use are actually XML based file formats -- also they are more like a wrapper that contain many disparate and related elements, as I will show you soon.

So how is a THMX file a wrapper? This one is easy -- just follow these steps:

1. Make a copy of any of the THMX files in your system -- or just save a THMX file from within PowerPoint -- look here -- and save it to somewhere easy to locate such as your Desktop (see Figure 1).
   
   
   Figure 1: A THMX file placed on the Desktop
   
   
2. Now ensure that your system is set to show file extensions. Look here for more info..
   
   Now, right-click the file, and choose Rename -- or just press F2. Add a ".zip" without the quotes right after the name of the file -- for example if your original file name was:
   
   indezine theme.thmx
   
   It would be renamed to:
   
   indezine theme.thmx.zip
   
   Windows will warn you that renaming the file extension could render this file unusable -- but since you are just working on a test file for now, go ahead and ignore this error by clicking the Yes button that you can see in Figure 2.
   
   
   Figure 2: Ignore this warning
   
   
3. Now that you have renamed the thmx file with a zip extension, you might probably agree with the Windows warning above. However, what if I told you that the thmx file was in fact just another zip file? You may or may not believe that -- and the easiest way to rectify this is by double-clicking on the renamed zip file.
   
   Depending upon whether you have a zipping product like WinZip or similar installed or not, one of two things will happen:
   
   If you have no extra zipping or archiving utilities installed, then the new zip file will open just like a conventional folder that you can see in Figure 3.
   
   
   Figure 3: The Theme Zip files shows up like a folder
   
   On the other hand if you have WinZip or another compression/archiving tool installed, then the zip file will open in that program as you can see in Figure 4.
   
   
   Figure 4: The Theme Zip file open in WinZip
   
   
4. Either way, you can now see that the original THMX file was actually nothing more than a collection of files that comprise the theme -- you'll find all sorts of files within the THMX wrapper including XML files, JPEG images, etc.
   
   The cool part is that if you know what you are doing, you can actually edit these XML files, and even replace the JPEG files! There's no harm caused by playing with these files since you are just working with a test file.
   
   
5. Once you have made any changes, go ahead and rename the zip extension back to thmx -- and you should be able to use this theme file in your Office documents.
   

This page was last updated on August 11th, 2008.

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