Change Microsoft Office Color Theme
Changing the Color Theme in Office 2013, including Outlook 2013, Word, Excel, was not possible until the final RTM release, which is unavailable on Technet and Volume Licenses sites at Microsoft. This has been a very sore subject with the Office 2013 Preview as the default White theme has been quite painful on the eyes. So changing the colors was the first thing I checked on after installing the RTM, and I’m excited to announce it is possible, and here’s how to do it. Again – This only works with Office 2013 RTM “Release to Manufacturer.” You cannot change the theme colors in the Preview. Launch Outlook 2013 (or Word or Excel…) and Click File > Options.
On the General Tab, click the down arrow under Office Theme to choose a new Office Color. White, Light Gray, and Dark Gray are the available options.
Once you choose a new Color Theme, it will take effect in all Office apps including Outlook 2013, Word 2013, Excel 2013, etc. Here’re a few screenshots of the new look. Click to Enlarge: My favorite is the Light Gray; however, I was also getting quite used to the White Color Theme. Microsoft is apparently trying to maintain a particular look here because the colors are relatively limited vs. Office 2010. Btw — dark gray??? Yuck!!! :) BETTER THAN EVER !!! I can’t wait ! Yah right. (being 100% sarcastic) Kudos to the GroovyPost team for this fix. Include the option for any color the customer can use for Office themes. Nevertheless, thanks for posting. They need to give back the options from 2010 I think. Thank you for your comments here. The dark grey works better, but still crummy. So finally we don’t have to worry about anti-trust as any version of any OS is going to be competitive by comparison. My 16yo daughter blew away Windows 8 and loaded Ubuntu last weekend. Crazy… Like always Microsoft has SCREWED UP again BIG TIME. Why can’t Microsoft just leave things alone? Please will someone tell them to STOP! (FYI: If it’s not broke don’t fix it). I use Microsoft 2010 at the office, in fact our entire network world wide does. Ok, so I come home and install MS-Office 365 2013 –Hello! It SUCKS just like windows 8 sucks. Windows XP was the Cadillac of all programs until Windows 7 came out. Windows 7 was nice and pretty cool. This weekend past, I bought a new PC and MS-Office 365. MISTAKE on two counts. Microsoft Office offers only three color choices, Crappy white, Dull Gray or Drk gray. In the “To-Do-Bar” it no longer gives you all of your appointments, it Only shows appointments for today, not even tomorrows will show up. 100% USELESS to me. As if this is not enough to tick you off, even the setup is all wrong, if you insert a photo directly into your email test …Sorry –Microsoft has removed Sharpen. There is not enough space here for me to continue with my warnings and issues about this program, it looks and feels cheap !!! It’s not professional at all like MS-Office 2007 or 2010. I’m going back like many of you here have stated. More money out of pocket but so be it to get what I want. Now if I could just downgrade form Windows 8 back to 7 this easy. Allow me to yell a bit here, in the hopes that someone from Microsoft will notice it: ARE ALL YOU YOUNG GUYS WORKING AT MS NOT AWARE THAT SOME PEOPLE HAVE TROUBLE WITH THEIR VISION–NOT JUST OLD PEOPLE, WHO OBVIOUSLY DO NOT MATTER TO YOU–BUT YOUNG PEOPLE LIKE YOU YOURSELVES? WHITE AND EVEN 2 SHADES OF GREY DO NOT CUT IT! AND, as you point out, Word 2013 looks and feels cheap. It’s as if MS were trying to make us think they have improved things, when they actually have put very little work into it. We are translators and have to have two computers for our work. I never dreamed that Microsoft would have made the new version of Word this awful. There should be warnings on the package! Unfortunately, we can’t afford to take the obvious solution and buy another copy of Word 2010 so that we would both have the same version. I also fail to see what advantage there is in making the scroll bars practically invisible until you hover over them. It is tiring to have your work surrounded by a barren plain of white with a few pale thin lines of black that you can hardly see! As it is now, we hate Word 2013. The only thing I have found to like about it is the fact that in Track Changes mode, you can click on the lines to the left to toggle between showing markup or not. That sure beats having to go to “Show Markup” and then clicking “Insertions and Deletions” over and over, when we are editing something. – from another Windows 8 hater (We even bought a new PC last month with Win 7 on it to replace my husband’s old one running XP.) Unlike Word 2013, there’s plenty of color in Win 8, but not the colors I like, and I would miss being able to set the desktop background as a slide show of my favorite photos. The tiles and colors are, of course, not all that I dislike about it, and we intend to hang onto Win 7 until Windows 9 comes out or longer. In case Win 9 is too much like Win 8, I am already looking into switching to some form of Linux, even if it means losing some of our favorite old programs. May experiment with Ubuntu on an old PC we have kicking around…) Why does your latest software feel less powerful, less flexible, less sophisticated, harder to use, and leave me as a user feeling less empowered than Word 6 et al did on a crummy old 386SX (then 486SX, then DX2) twenty-ish years ago? Two decades is a long time to have been making essentially the same set of programs (WP, SS, DB, DTP, Email and various project planners and also-ran graphics packages) with minor changes to their actual core usefulness, and – since the latter third of that period – gradually more ruinous changes to the UI. Are you so mired in a rut of inability to actually improve its workplace usefulness vs the days of Windows 3.1, and therefore feel so threatened in your ability to continue shifting units and continue as a business (as people find they have no “real” reason to upgrade once they’ve bought a copy) that your only weapons are to regularly change the document formats to ones that become gradually less compatible with older versions of the program, to mess about with the interface (uglifying it and stealing away familiar structures, powerful if deeply-nested commands, and acres of ever-more-precious vertical on-screen real estate in the dubious name of “streamlining” even though the result seems the exact opposite, making the UI clunky and “in your face”), and to gradually transition over to a subscription and cloud based (and therefore ultimately very friable) infrastructure to keep the money rolling in? I still have a 486SX in my lounge, for retro gaming. It has Word 6 on its hard disk, and Win3.1… with a bit of coaxing, it will do 1024×768 mode in 16 colours, with some side borders, through my 1366×768 TV. For all practical intents and purposes, this makes it at least – if not more – usable for the actual business of word processing documents than an otherwise bleeding-edge laptop with a WXGA screen. It’s got more usable vertical pixels. Horizontally, it doesn’t have subpixel rendering, but that’s not SO massive a loss. The 8.3 filenames can be a pain, as can be converting the files back and forth, but, hey, we’ll always have RTF, right? And Wordpad still groks .DOC quite nicely, even if the kerning goes a bit strange. Just gotta figure out how to hook up a wireless keyboard to it and we can let the good times roll. And get this – I can still set the colour scheme to WHATEVER I DAMN WELL PLEASE. Win 3.1, in 16 colours, still had a bunch of perfectly good High Contrast choices (AND a Large Fonts option with most video drivers), plus some more subtle ones that were quite pleasing to the 20/20 trichromat (and of course, the option to make your own), and all of the programs followed it, rather than being allowed to carve their own crazy path like Office (despite it coming from the same company!), Chrome, Quicktime et al. When we had competition in the 1990s from dBase, Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Symphony, ect, Microsoft had reason to strive to be better – it’s called free market competition. Now, not so much. Now it looks like “Mister Softee” is trying to look more and more like Apple. I am also seriously considering a jump to Open Office, if MSO’13 is as horrid as the previews seem and we end up getting forced to upgrade at work… Also, what’s it like for bulleting, paragraph spacing etc? Does it still do all sorts of annoying automatic formatting stuff, generally getting it 100% wrong (as in not just a slight misinterpretation, but the polar opposite to what you actually wanted to do, and would have done quite easily in a previous generation, and now have to waste time trying to fix the terrible-looking mess it’s forced upon you, turning the work of a 2-decades-experienced MSO typist into something that looks like it was made by a 6-year-old) ?? … and for the love of God have they worked out how to make Page Breaks work properly yet?! I mean, it’s only been maybe ten years since they started going wrong, I know that’s not a lot of time to fix a small but very troublesome piece of misbehaviour that can seriously wreck the pagination and formatting of an important document… Updating to a new computer and operating system should not be having to go back to school. If it has extra bells and whistles that’s great, but I want to open up my computer and get working immediately. Just give me a video to show me what is new and exciting and I’ll start experimenting the new features when I get around to it. If I’m going to be forced to relearn everything then I might as well go to a whole new operating system. Whomever was the unmitigated idiot who approved these limited, nearly impossible to read, color schemes should be fired, and never allowed to work again. Idiots. Idiots. Idiots I will switch to open office! Word sucks anyway. Always had. Much preferred WordPerfect in my law office days. AND what is with the FLAT look??? It’s called SHADING..it creates DEPTH. I want buttons to look like friggin buttons!!! Congratulations Microsoft. I also work with Intuit QuickBooks, and they even allow different border colours for different data files – very handy when you are juggling more than one file for the same program! Or they could make it look good again. This version of Outlook 2013 is complete garbage. Seriously, I believe in the freedom of information. I also believe in paying for services rendered. This means that I will not pay for something all of us own. It also means that if you put in effort to make something of that which all of us own, then I will gladly reward you for your efforts. SO, this shit thing about the missing colour Microsoft decided to do with their product does not have me appreciate the lack of effort, in fact it caused me the inverse – it frustrated the hell out of me. 2 months later a techie at work popped up from nowhere one day and told me they are reverting back to the old Outlook, since too many complaints and loss of income due to people complaining about this. He reverted after I hesitated and an hour later I could see in color again. The next day I realized that I lost all my emails between april 2013 and july 2014. I am still debliksim in, because I work from email history. I for one HATE Microsoft, just because they along with the elite causes billions of people slavery lifestyle. This is not just about colour, but the colour represent a far deeper shade of black we are moving in as a civilization. These statements you made are true, too: “I am sure that no executive who has any decision power has tried the product before it is released. They forgot that we buy tools to use them in our work.” I admit that 10 sounds much better that 8 did, but I still love being able to make my desktop a slideshow of all my favorite photos, and in any event, I very much dislike the Windows 8/10 desktop that forces you to use all those jewel colored rectangles. Fine for people who don’t care, but I do! Anyone know if Macintosh lets you run a slideshow as the background on the desktop? Probably not, huh? Sigh… I started computing in the early 80’s and the driving force then was exploration, creativity, freedom and choice. This software makes me feel like I’m being herded into a corral where I’m expected to be like everyone else and like what they think I should like. I don’t want to work in a stodgy, drab sterile office environment and this makes me feel like that. Talk about squelching creative juice! HELP ME! Exactly! Has there been any sign that anyone at MS is listening? Still hoping… I like running single instances of Excel on two monitors. Comment Name * Email *
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