How to change the theme of Office 2013

(I'm not posting this "at you", ChecMark. I'm just using your "Reply" button. EDIT: Sorry if you got two notices......the incompetent programers of this website strip all the formatting of a post if it's pasted.  Even if it's Word and Text formatting. And that includes everything after the paste. ARG)

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Again, I'll be you a double espresso that the team that shipped this new forums site got a bunch of bonuses and stocks. If those numb nuts ever use forums and realize that there are lots of freeware out there that have MUCH better support for threads, replies, quotes, multi-quotes, etc.... they might just freeze and die.

Back to the original topic of this Office theme mess, it is not the aesthetics that matter but the usability. Our MS account manager (poor guy) tried briefly to regurgitate the corporate message before we told him to not bother because the standards committee will not approve this new office version. He was actually grateful because he felt he would be doing us a disservice if he pushed it onto our company.

One interested bit of information that came out of the discussion was with almost no real contrasting colors, how did they pass ADA accessibility requirements? Most of the time, you can't even tell where the scroll bar was or which folder in outlook was highlighted. Does the ADA have specific requirements themes that use clearly contrasting colors to make it easier for users that are visually impaired to view the screens?

Anybody know folks in ADA to get them to look into this? I'd really like to see a bulletin from the ADA asking consumers to stay away from office 2013.

When it has to be costing millions how could any company, even wealthy Microsoft, unleash this horrible "upgrade" on purpose? Windows and Office have always been their "cash cows", if only because they've lagged behind or failed at everything else they've done. 

Forrester estimates there are now more than two billion computers (desktop, laptop, tablets) in the world. Wikipedia estimates that over 90% of them are running some version of Windows and 75% of computers are for business. I don't know the costs to upgrade Windows or Office for large corporations, but even bulk licensing isn't cheap. If you read the posts here about companies that either aren't upgrading or, even worse, are rolling back to previous versions, all because their staff LOATHE the new versions, the cost to Microsoft has to be in the billions of dollars. One would think that even the mighty Microsoft can't survive this money drain.

No doubt the "brain drain" is also hurting Microsoft, probably because really smart developers are in high demand and they prefer to work for a visionary company, which Microsoft hasn't been for a very long time. If you look at the record of Apple under Steve Jobs, they smoked Microsoft long ago. Google must be very happy that Steve didn't get into search engines. Bing and IE are both pathetic jokes. As a website designer I can tell you it's so frustrating that Microsoft won't adopt the same browser standards as all the other players and we constantly have to write patches for IE to work. They gave us a wonderful upgrade of FrontPage to Expressions, then immediately discontinued it.

Bill Gates is an amazing man and doing wonderful work with his foundation, but just like Steve Jobs stepped back in to save Apple, I wish Bill would come back and save Microsoft. It's a rudderless ship, drifting back and forth with no direction and often going backwards. If I were a Google I'd be frantically building a Linux desktop and Office alternative. Over 90% of the world's biggest computers use some variant of Linux. Android is also built on Linux. It's far more robust and stable than Windows, with a lot less overhead.

Microsoft may well have commanded the desktop market for decades, but with this huge debacle of Windows 7 and 8 together with this disaster that is Office 2013, and, most importantly, their arrogant attitude of "take it or leave it" is going to bring Goliath down. The whole Office team either needs the boot or a new leader who will start listening to customers and crack the whip before it's too late to recover. This is a crisis and needs crisis management, not arrogance.

I think microsoft is doing this on purpose...  

They rile us all into a frenzy with this revolting piece of garbage to lower on expectations.  Come back in a few months with previously released features that we actually find useful, more theme options to not blind us and waaaalla.  Their incredibly lackluster product turns into gold.

I upgraded to 2013 on only one computer and everytime I have to use office w/ this computer I go nuts.  This new version is awful.  I get so annoyed I have a hard time working.  All that white is so blinding!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

****pull hair from frustration*******

Interesting take, Brian. Although I might understand why this staff shortage means there is no one to address all the concerns expressed here, that doesn't explain why someone in management made the decision to wipe out half the features of previous versions, going all the way back to Office 2003. Customers clearly preferred to be able to set their own preferences as they always have, based on things like their monitors and colors they preferred. All the focus groups given a preview of Office 2013 stated they loathed the lack of themes, so why did Microsoft just launch the product anyway? If they knew they were going to make so many customers livid by removing all the previous themes they would have been far better to have delayed the launch until they were ready. 

Microsoft have clearly shown that they are less and less concerned what customers think, preferring to just dictate to the market and expect we will all follow like sheep. They're wrong and if they aren't careful, it will be their demise.