How to change the theme of Office 2013

I agree %100 Angie and most people ignore the power we have as consumers.

Two things you can do

1. Vote with your wallet/IT budget - our company's standard software board (I'm a member) have moved Office off the standard list to special requests only list. Individuals and teams now have to provide justification for upgrading to current or newer versions. We're actively testing various other open source options for broad replacement. It's been a long and consuming process but we believe we will be better in the long run. I'm sure we'll still have bits and pieces of office here and there but that should be less than 10% of our 70K employees when all is done. We used to be 100%.
2. Email their executives directly - if you really can't get rid of this really bad piece of software, then email their senior executives even up to the CEO. Ask your account rep, TAM, PFE, etc... for the email ID or just figure it out based on their names; it's not that hard. I won't bother with the middle managers since they're the ones that likely approved or even came up with these color schemes, or at least their teams did. The incompetent will protect their own so skip them entirely and go straight to the top.

You should also research the various laws and/or requirements related to visual settings for software. I have not heard of having bad setting being illegal but I do know of government agencies having requirements for contrast and color settings to ensure users with vision limitations/problems and setup they way they need to. Software that don't meet the requirements are not eligible to be proposed in response to RFPs.

Well said! It's so sad that Microsoft is completely ignoring the hundreds of complaints on here about what a total disaster Office 2013 is. I can't believe that they don't freak out when they read that some IT manager has not "upgraded" to Office 2013 on hundreds of computers in their organization because their users loathe the lack of any discernable color separations. Why ever would any company remove features that were in previous versions? I think the best comment I've read in the years I've been following this is, "Microsoft, get over yourselves!" They have obviously lost any concern for their customer base and they are letting a handful of developers have their own way, believing they know best what we want. No, you don't. Apparently Office 2016 is just as bad so, please, someone in senior management, listen to us and start paying attention. At the very least respond to all these complaints and explain why you are ignoring all of us.

Somehow you need to run these things by your real end users before making these decisions.  ...   People who really use these products don't get to spend much time playing games and surfing the net so we need to have something to work with that doesn't give you a headache and eye pain from looking at it but doesn't take up all of the memory with how pretty it is.  Those of us who have to use our computers for work, Windows main users btw, don't want a lot of change, just improve on what we have, we don't have an abundance of time to spend re-learning systems for the sake of change.  That is why so many people have stayed with XP, good product for working people.

OMGosh! So true! One of my board members generously installed Office 2013 for me & I'm going to UNinstall & change back to 2010. I've had it!

Look, Micro$oft! I don't want or need fancy skins with cute patterns or puppies or stars or seaweed. I just want to be able to choose the colors that work for me and for my office environment and make looking at a screen all day easier. This can NOT be that difficult to do, code-wise. Even I can imagine how it might be done in a high-level language and I'm not even a half-competent code monkey, so doing it at the level of building foundation apps can't be beyond the developers of Office.

And STOP "enhancing" the app with new features. I don't need any more features. I don't use 80% of them as it is. I want it to smoothly do the things it promised to do 20 years ago (headers & footers in sections are still the biggest headache imaginable), and do them quickly. I did not need a new interface (apparently revised purely for the sake of being seen to be doing something, and certainly not with any thought to improving the user experience).

2013 has not only added clicks to most formerly simple tasks, but has cleverly hidden functions that commonly appeared on my toolbar in past versions. WHY?! I don't understand what can possibly be the thinking.

Dear Micro$oft, GET OVER YOURSELVES! Please?