Patent 7783971 was granted and assigned to Microsoft on August, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
A common visual appearance can be applied to documents authored by different kinds of applications. Thus, a suite of applications can have a theme that can be applied to differing kinds of documents produced by the different kinds of applications in the suite of applications. The theme information can be stored externally to the produced documents as well as internally to the produced documents. The theme can include visual attributes of the documents as well as content, such as text or other information.