How to change the theme of Office 2013

"Dark Gray" = white

"Light Gray"= whiter

"White" = snowblindness

So folks, there's quite a lot of chatter about this. And frankly no reviewer likes it. There are numerous efforts to try to hack Office 2013, but to date, only small steps have been made and no stable output to change Office  has really worked to-date. Meanwhile, we have tried changing monitor settings, you name it. What we gain in glare reduction we lose in ability to see in line document placement lines, various character fonts, and bottom line, an idea of what the printed doc will look like  before it hits the printers. 

As a result, we've given  up on Microsoft. Rackspace and USA dropped 2013. So did we, and went to far better templating, form, and typesetting tools that work without the buggies of word (which has never done well with many in line graphs. We now use Open/Libre Office (they're interchangeable), and doc creation, collaboration tools like Git and LaTeX. 

We were concerned that the learning curve would cause too much frustration. To our surprise, it didn't. In fact   nearly everyone once they  became used to the new environment reported the preference to drop the mouse more, and develop docs with concentration on substance first, then add the final tweaks. By doing that, the normal course of their work flow has developed reusable libraries of off the shelf templates for particular colors, styles, etc. Time to complete documentation has reduced in time to anywhere from 20% to a bit over 85% (b/c these tools allow for automation of mundane stuff).

We're considering publishing a white paper on this and how we developed it. The employees feel a ton happier with this, and they can concentrate on the things they'd rather be doing (where automating tasks wins).  It has saved us several hundred thousand in licensing costs, reduced time and frustration  of getting projects completed, and the quality of the work, given redirected concentration has made large improvements. 

The only thing various employees at different levels have said is that they generally prefer MS EXCEL slightly over open/libre office's spreadsheet, as excel is generally more nimble. But that gap appears to be closing rapidly and the spreadsheet functionality is largely indifferent. Given we use spreadsheets for productivity rather than analysis, that is a bit of a quirk, but we have also changed our approach in how we process information  before we ever need the productivity suite, so that has had very little overall impact. 

If  Microsoft cannot tell the difference  between the workers of the world, and the young mp3 slurping coffee klatches who have far more sensibility to "coolness" than to functionality and ergonomics, then office is indeed in trouble. It is widely heralded the OS is at risk of degeneration, maybe it's time we quit wishing, paying the Redmond piper our hard earned money, and just move on......Some issues created just cannot reasonably be undone.

Having just "upgraded" my iPhone 3G to a 5s and thus iOS 7.1, I now have come to believe that ugly and flat and blinded by white are "the new thing" in the design bubble where iOS and Office 2013 designers live. Perhaps they're the same people shuttling between Redmond and Cupertino on a clandestine job-share program.

Is there a way to set the default theme through the OCT?  I want my users to see the light grey theme by default in all Office 2013 applications, as I am suppressing the "First Run" dialog via the OCT.  I looked through the user settings listing and did not see a setting to do this.

Yes in OCT, go to "Modify user settings" and expand Microsoft Office 2013 > Global Options, Customize and you will find the "Default UI Theme" setting.

Enjoy