How to Use the Eyedropper Tool in PowerPoint to Match Corporate Brand Colors Exactly

Maintaining brand consistency is critical when creating professional slide decks. If your company’s logo uses a specific shade of navy blue, your presentation’s titles, borders, and charts should utilize that exact same hex code. Attempting to visually guess the colour using PowerPoint’s standard color palette inevitably results in mismatched, unprofessional-looking slides.

Instead of hunting down the official brand style guide document to manually type in RGB or Hex codes, you can use Microsoft PowerPoint’s built-in Eyedropper tool to instantly sample and apply the exact colour from any logo, image, or graphic currently on your screen.

How to Use the Eyedropper Inside PowerPoint

If the colour you want to match is already visible inside your presentation (for example, you have inserted a JPEG of your company logo onto the slide), matching the colour takes mere seconds.

1. Select the text, shape, or border that you want to change the colour of.
2. Navigate to the Shape Format or Home tab on the ribbon.
3. Click the small downward arrow next to Shape Fill, Shape Outline, or Font Color (depending on what you are changing).
4. At the bottom of the dropdown menu, click on Eyedropper. Your mouse cursor will turn into a small pipette icon.
5. Hover the pipette over the specific colour in the logo or image on your slide. A small square preview box will appear, showing you the exact RGB values you are about to select.
6. Click once. The selected object will instantly change to match that exact colour.

The Hidden Trick: Sampling Colors Outside of PowerPoint

The standard Eyedropper method works perfectly for images already on your slide. However, what if the color you want to match is on a website in your web browser, or in a PDF document open on another monitor? Most users assume they must take a screenshot, paste it into PowerPoint, sample it, and then delete the screenshot.

This is unnecessary. PowerPoint’s Eyedropper has a hidden drag-and-drop capability that allows it to sample pixels anywhere on your entire computer screen.

1. Ensure both PowerPoint and the application containing your target colour (e.g., your web browser) are visible on your screen side-by-side.
2. Select your shape or text in PowerPoint.
3. Open the colour dropdown menu and select the Eyedropper tool as usual.
4. Crucial Step: Click and hold the left mouse button down anywhere inside the PowerPoint slide canvas. Do not release the button.
5. While holding the mouse button down, drag your cursor outside of the PowerPoint window and hover over the web browser or PDF document.
6. You will notice the small preview box is now capturing the colours of the external application.
7. Hover over the exact corporate color you need, and release the mouse button.

PowerPoint will instantly pull the exact colour data from the external application and apply it to your shape. Furthermore, that specific colour is now permanently saved in the “Recent Colors” section of your PowerPoint palette, meaning you can easily apply it to other objects throughout your presentation without needing to use the Eyedropper again.