How to Change Font Color in Google Slides (One Slide or All at Once)

Changing the color of one heading takes three clicks. Changing the same wrong shade of blue on 40 slides, in titles, bullet lists, table cells and chart labels, is a different job entirely. This guide covers both: the quick basics first, then the three ways to do it deck-wide.

Change the Font Color of Selected Text (the Basics)

Steps:

1. Select the text you want to recolor (or click the text box border once to select the whole box).
2. In the toolbar, click the Text color button: the letter A with a colored underline.
3. Pick a color from the palette, or click the + under "Custom" to enter a hex code.

Tip: selecting the box (solid border) instead of dragging over the text changes every character inside it at once, including mixed-color runs.

That's all you need for one text box. The rest of this guide is about the harder question: every slide at once.

Why Changing Font Color on Every Slide Is Hard

Google Slides stores text color per text run: a single text box can contain five different colors, applied by different people at different times. And the built-in find-and-replace (Ctrl+H) only works on text content, not on formatting. There is no native "find every occurrence of #1A73E8 and repaint it" command.

So the realistic options are the theme editor (method 1), the master slide (method 2), or a color find-and-replace add-on (method 3).

Method 1: Change Theme Colors

If your deck was built cleanly on the theme palette, recoloring the theme's "Text" or accent positions updates every element that references them.

1. Go to Slide → Edit theme.
2. Click Colors in the toolbar.
3. Pick the color position your text uses (Text, Accent 1 to 6), then set the new value.

The catch: any text whose color was applied as "Custom" (pasted content, imported slides, a collaborator picking a hex code by hand) is invisible to the theme editor and won't change. In collaborative decks, that's usually most of the offending text.

Verdict: elegant for clean, self-built decks. Unreliable for anything edited by more than one person.

For a deeper look at theme colors versus custom colors, see our guide on changing all colors in Google Slides.

Method 2: Edit the Master Slide

Under View → Master you can recolor the default placeholder text for each layout. Slides that still inherit from those placeholders will follow.

The catch: the moment someone typed over a placeholder with a manual color, or added a free text box, that text stopped inheriting. The master won't touch it.

Verdict: good for building templates, mostly ineffective for fixing existing content.

Method 3: Find and Replace the Color Across All Slides

This is the find-and-replace that Slides is missing. Search & Replace Colors and Fonts scans your actual deck and lists every color in use, wherever it came from: theme, custom hex, pasted content.

1. Open your presentation and go to Extensions → Search&Replace → Replace Colors.
2. The add-on scans the deck and shows every color it found, with the number of occurrences.
3. Click the color your text uses, pick the replacement (palette or hex), and confirm.
4. Every occurrence updates in one pass: text, but also shapes, borders, tables and charts painted with the same color, so the whole deck stays consistent.

Verdict: the only method that reaches text colors regardless of how they were applied. One free replacement lets you test it on your own deck before paying anything.

Which Method Should You Use?

If you built the deck yourself, on one theme, without pasting from other decks: try method 1 first, it's native and instant. If you're setting up a template for future decks: method 2. If you're staring at an existing, real-world deck where the wrong color appears in dozens of places: method 3 is the one that actually finishes the job.