How to change the theme of Office 2013

I'd honestly be surprised if it were resolved before next year.  Had they planned on dealing with this quickly, it would likely already have been done.

The difficult part - writing the code that makes the changes - is finished. We know it is because we can go from white to gray.   So it's just a matter of distributing a patch with a payload of color palette values.

But, right now, a color change problem is not a priority. I mean, I'm not the only IT director who's going to skip Office 2013 unless, at a minimum, Outlook is made dependable.

And also, MS decided to drop support for Access Data Projects so, I may just take the budget I had for deploying Office 2013 and spend it on converting my ADPs........Probably to an Oracle platform. I know I'm not the only one doing that.

But if you want a really good idea of how little MS cares what you and I and the other 50 or so people on this thread think about the colors in Office 2013, go on over to Cnet.com and have a laugh over the top 10 desktop customization downloads - there's upwards of 1.5 million downloads of some of the various Start Menu replacements people are using to fix Windows 8.

And that's just Cnet.   lolololol

Jennie E, if so many people are complaining about the new colour schemes, why is this not a priority to get resolved. The person who designed this should be managed out the door.

Want to add my voice to the chorus of disappointed Office 2013 users.  I've been a Microsoft Office user since Office 95, upgrading each time a new version was released.  Accordingly, I spent the last two months trying to get used to the new "minimalist" office color themes in Office 2013, hoping I would get used to them or Microsoft would cave in to the loud and persistant cries to fix this problem. However, in looking at this thread that goes back some nine months and seeing Microsoft repeatedly posting the standard "corporate boiler plate" answer, I've finally decided to throw in the towel and go back to Office 2010, or maybe take a look at what the competition is offering...something I haven't done since I moved from Word Perfect to Office in 1995.    

While I'm not directly involved in making IT decisions for the two clients I work for, the US Air Force and an internationally recognized operational research firm, I do intend to make my experience known to the respective IT managers and strongly recommend they not deploy Office 2013 until this problem is resolved.

Hiii,

You can also change your theme  in another way,

1. Click on File  at the top left corner.
2. Then click on Account.
3. You are able to see theme setting on your monitor screen. Three options are available – White default, Light Gray & Dark Gray.

press OK twice then save changes All office 2013 theme  colors will have changed.

Have you actually done that and compared the difference? Also, did you read the rest of the thread on how ineffective this is?

In my experience of dealing with Microsoft for over 10 years as a partner and customers, I find there are lots of people in Microsoft that sit around cooking things up to justify their monthly paychecks and stocks. Customer needs are irrelevant since they can always hire any number of "research companies" to provide data that everything is peachy. Specific to this office UI issue, I know of many very senior engineers in Microsoft that work on other stuff (servers, online, etc...) that absolutely hate it and would not have upgraded if they didn't get pressure from management or the IT department.

The people that created this problem have all been rewarded with bonuses and pay raises so don't expect work anytime soon. After things heat up to the boiling point, the same people who created the problem will either:

1. solve the problem they created simply by bringing back features they took out the last time (easy peasy)
2. create new problems that would make the current ones seem pale in comparison so attention shifts and the old problem magically fades away

As a senior manager of the DBAs in my org, I'm just a user of office but I am also on the standard software committee. I already have and you can be guaranteed I will continue to block standardization of Office 2013 in my company. We already have enough grief from the few pilot groups. Btw, my company has over 70K employees.