How to change the theme of Office 2013

All I can suggest is to do what I did.  I rolled back Office 2013 and reloaded Office 2010 on all my computers.  I've told everyone that I work with NOT to install Office 2013 for all the reasons cited in this blog.  In the meantime I'm seriously reviewing other office suites.  It may be time to switch.  BTW, my experience with Office 2013 has also kept me from moving over to Windows 8 on all of my computers.  That's a few hundred dollars more that Microsoft has lost. 

Heard yesterday that Microsoft has been putting their energy into a version of MS Office that runs on iPads and iPhones.   They gotta be crazy if they think I'm going to install anything from MS on my mobile devices after this experience. 

fightergator

Come on Microsoft!!

17 pages of nothing but complains and still no more themes???

The whole industry is addicted, like a bunch of street-corner junkies, to change for change's sake.

I understand that there is a rational element to periodically sprucing up the appearance of things, in that customers like to know that a given product is being kept up-to-date. The problem is that MS (and not just MS, believe me,) can't seem to grasp that whole "baby-bathwater" thing, to say nothing of the concept of "subtlety." If your exciting, gosh-gee-whiz change-for-change's-sake is not just an annoying aesthetic reversion to kindergarten (more on that in a minute,) but also screws up actual functionality for no identifiable reason, then what you've got is a gosh-gee-whiz... fail.

What I hadn't figured out at first, but which is now clear, is that this Microsoft product-self-destruct "upgrade" - as seen in Office 2013 - is an offshoot of the noxious Windows 8 OS.

Which is to say: Universally-hated garbage.

For whatever reason, Microsoft's Operating Systems seem to alternate:

Great - Garbage - Great - Garbage - Great - Garbage.

or respectively,

Windows 98SE - Windows 2000 - Windows XP - Windows Vista - Windows 7 - Windows 8.

So hopefully Windows 9 will discard basically 100% of that repulsive Windows 8 miscue, and become another 98SE, XP or 7? Truthfully, Microsoft could've saved itself a ton of development money, and its customers a ton of aggravation, and just stuck with 98SE. It was stable, functional, and hassle-free. Let the voyeur-fascists at NSA go pound sand - we do not need or want a brand-spankin' new OS version every 2.1 years or whatever it is, and if the government fascists want to impose their Jack-Secret backdoors into computer operating systems, then let them hack their way in like the rest of the world's criminals. But I digress.

Perhaps I'm p*ssing against the wind, but I do not own Apple products and will not, under any circumstances, give Apple Inc. so much as the steam off my spit on a winter sidewalk, ever. Period. Full stop.

Which means that I do not do iPhones, I do not do iPads, I do not do anything even remotely resembling them. I still use a flip-phone, righteously. I use Windows Operating Systems - the sane ones - righteously.

Aside from my utter contempt for Apple as a company in general and for its neo-fascist CEO in particular, a big part of why I want nothing to do with a Stupid Phone ("smart" is the new stupid,) is because I do not care to spend the better part of the rest of my life wiping fingerprint-smudges off of "touch screens."

I can see the practical argument for touchscreens on small-screen devices like phones, but... on computers?!? Umm, no.

Guys, I grew out of fingerpainting by roughly my first month out of kindergarten, and think about it: What the reversion from keyboards to "touchscreens" represents - and that whole "See the big green block; Push the green block to see Spot run; See the big purple block; Push the big purple block to see Jane run" control scheme - is a reversion to kiddie fingerpainting, and the intellectual level associated therewith. Sorry guys, but I'm all grown up now. Which means I can type, and that my basic motor skills are up to the task of running a mouse.

The only electronic gadget I own that has a touchscreen is an e-book reader, and even with a device you only have to touch to flip pages, it still p**sses me off to have to scrub the grease off of that thing every 20 minutes. Do we need this childish garbage? Ummm, no.

And just don't get me started on Orwoogle, or that totalitarian-wannabe creep Eric Schmidt.

/rant

Microsoft has degenerated into a very bad joke. Not only is Office 2013 a total disaster, but they are also gradually destroying other products that were adopted by the whole world. They had no real competition. What company wouldn't love that? 

The lack of themes in Office 2013 is not just cosmetic. Thousands of people have limited vision and need effective contrast and color to use Office 2013. In just a few months of using Office 2013 I've noticed eye strain at the end of a long day using it. As a user since the day Office was released I have trouble using the "ribbons" because they don't make sense. My productivity has gone way down, searching and searching for what used to be a logical function.

Again, for decades I've used PowerPoint for many different reasons. It helped me win a quarter of a million dollar contract when the client was so impressed with my presentation. I've taught courses and used PowerPoint extensively. I also accept that many people have become a little numb to another boring PowerPoint presentation, so I break it up with transitions, audio and VIDEO. I just did a major presentation for a business Course and I searched for hours trying to figure out why I could not include my video clips from YouTube, only to discover that with PowerPoint 2013 you can't include video. Seriously? Microsoft blames Google and does nothing about it. Certainly a major feature of any presentation and it's just gone.

Even Outlook, my favorite email and contact management program for decades. The switch from @hotmail to @outlook was a total nightmare. I just couldn't get my email for days and support was useless. When I got my new computer I followed Microsoft's specific instructions on how to transfer the outlook.pst file. Nothing worked. I tried everything I could think of, but no matter what I did I was missing all kinds of email and sub folders. I ended up painfully exporting and importing for hours and I'm still missing tons of emails. This has already posed many problems when I could not find older emails about a particular issue. Just another total disaster from Microsoft.

Even what's happened with Internet Explorer, once the only browser people would use. At one point after a new release I downloaded the latest version directly from Microsoft, only to get a Trojan and my computer went the dreaded blue screen. It took me days to recover all my data. I reported this disaster to Microsoft but they didn't even respond. IE is in the final stages of death now thanks to their ineptitude and Bing is also a disaster. I've tried it a few times and can't fathom where or how they get their results, but they have nothing to do with what I searched for. I'm happily back to Chrome, on which I have never had a single issue.

As the eternal optimist and a decades long supporter of Microsoft I'm hopeful that Bill Gates will get back involved and see how far the company has fallen without him. Maybe he'll kick some butts and boot the slackers out the door. I can only hope that the entire Office 2013 team gets shown the door. They are beyond incompetent and if it were me I'd be glad to see them go to the competition to destroy them.

Come on, Bill. Take the reins again and return Microsoft to its former glory.