How to change the theme of Office 2013

Thank you for the feedback on Office’s new look. We are actively collecting, sorting and reading through feedback on Office 2013’s design and User Experience. As the audience for Office 2013 grows, we are being mindful of patterns and pain points that emerge from user feedback. While we do not have any additional Themes planned at this time, it is an issue we are watching very closely.

Notice after a year nothing still has been done by the lackluster themes forced on users.

Wow....I find it a little astonishing that Microsoft is seriously pushing people AWAY from it's new Office product by doing something as stupid as not allowing users to change or add their own custom colors to Outlook and Office. It's so difficult to look at, especially on large monitors! I honestly haven't even got to see how it works because I can't get past the overall brazenness of the interface's colors. Something as simple as the colors are seriously driving people away. 

Are they just seriously trying to lose even more customers? wow...

Exactly what happened to me. Been a Windows user for some 25 years now. I just (reluctantly) bought my first Mac as my home desktop computer. Windows 8 is a debacle. But I do need standard office applications. Still have 2003 on my laptop and that's fine. For the home desktop I then tried 365 home thinking that all things considered the 5 licenses and cross platform option is actually an OK deal. And it looks good enough on a Mac (=Office 2011 for Mac). But when I installed it on my wife's Win 7 PC it lasted about 5 minutes before she asked me to roll back to her 2007. And exactly for the reason you and everyone else here mentions.

I feel like this is almost a disability question. They don't provide anything for people with eye issues who can't be exposed to this extreme brightness (add to that that modern LCD/LED screens are WAY too bright out of the box anyway).

Actually, amongst IT staffs, the Win8/Metro scam has done far more serious damage than the obvious mistakes in Office. And I'm not using hyperbole, that was literally a scam: there was absolutely no programmatic or overall architectural reason to remove the Start Menu. 

If there had been functional reasons for the move, it would have behooved MS to make Metro an optional operating environment in 8, and mandatory in 9. Up until the RTM version of 8, you could reg hack the Start Menu back into 8 - this left IT staffs thinking they didn't have to prep users for an environment change.

When I saw the reg hack was gone in the RTM, I was caught flat-footed, just like God-Knows-How-Many other IT directors were. And I had to scramble to prep training for 300+ users while already having to make plans for some of the other **** MS pulled this product cycle - like pointlessly ending support for Access Data Projects in Access. We're figuring that alone is going to cost us 150K in porting our ADPs.

You're right about the poor implementations of FlatUI - although, it was actually Apple that copied MS. The industry recognizes that MS did it first with their Win7 phone. Where MS got the idea from, no one knows...

I half-jokingly tell people MS stole it from me...which is entirely possible. I started doing that in VB4 in 98, when I was still a programmer at BofA....I hated the way the objects looked - especially the buttons - they were chintzy and reflected poorly on me - if an app looks bad, users who are "on the fence" about it, will assume it's bad. So, for my last database at BofA, I built a flat button class - complete with color changes on the roll-over events - and then flattened everything else. I also used a muted color scheme to help users keep track of where they were and used text as super-graphics.

In 2000, I was contracted to write what ended up being a 30k lines-of-code database at a private club in Seattle. A lot of that DB was member-facing...and a lot of those members are upper-eschelon MS employees...programmers and VPs who had to interact with that program every time they walked in the door...3 or 4 years later, MS introduces FlatUI on their first phone.......hm.

But, I'm just stroking my ego...it's entirely possible they were going "Flat", anyway.

Interesting story... but Metro was first used in Encarta 95, and the old MSN. Over time they started to use it more and more. Like Windows XP Media Center Edition has a metro design, the Zune...

A lot of companies follow MS's design trend... Remember in 2007 when Vista was as glassy and chrome covered as an OS could be. Programs, websites, advertisements, and graphics in general followed the same thing. Now they are doing the same thing with Windows 8.

Either way, MS is just combating Apple. People were complaining that MS was not revolutionary and the same old. All of a sudden, now that Windows is different and is new, people are whining that they want Windows 7 back.  Listen people, change just is a fact of life, and you originally wanted it too. I get that people want backwards compatibility... but seriously... sometimes you just have to move on and learn something new.

And you really think that Microsoft does not have a reasonable support lifetime? Apple deems their 4-year iPad to be as good as garbage. My 6-year old laptop runs Windows 7, and will be supported until 2021, and software and security for it will be around for a long time.