Not all Word 2013 Document Themes available

Anonymous
2014-10-28T19:50:20+00:00

I am a computer teacher and some of my students have many document themes available in Word 2013 and others have very few.  What can I look at on the student's profile to make all document themes available to all of my students?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2014-11-13T22:41:57+00:00

I ran into the same problem, and after following the advice that was given on here I had no luck. I did however, find a work-around! 

If you go to the Microsoft Templates/Themes site linked below:

https://store.office.live.com/templates/Themes

you should be able to browse to the missing theme you need. I know, I know..it says it is for Power Point...BUT.....follow these steps:

  • Click on the theme you need
  • Click the Open in Power Point Online option (I do not know if you need to have PowerPoint installed, but here it gives me a message saying the theme will be saved to my OneDrive)
  • Click Continue if you have the same message pop up
  • Now it should open up a Power Point presentation in the theme you need
  • Click on File
  • Click Save As
  • Click the Download button that should look like this:
  • Once I clicked download, a blank white screen popped up in a pop-up, but when I closed it and looked in my Downloads folder the Power Point Presentation file was there.
  • Rename the file (I chose the name of the theme) and put it in a file you can easily locate.
  • Now when you open MS Word and choose to browse for themes, go to this file and select it. Even though it says on the website that it is for Power Point, I was successful in applying this as the theme file I needed.

Hopefully someone out there finds this information helpful, because I was going crazy trying to figure this out!

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Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2015-02-15T09:16:13+00:00

The themes should be saved in the following folder:

C:\Users[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\Document Themes

and they should then appear as Custom Themes in the Themes dropdown.

For users of earlier versions of Office, there is a copy of the themes from various versions of Office (2007, 2010, 2013) in folders under the following folder of my One Drive

http://1drv.ms/1utd6rX

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-02-08T07:25:10+00:00

    I am taking an online Excel class and I ran into the same issue. I had many themes available last week and now all but 9 disappeared. I need to use one of the themes for a lab assignment and it is no longer available. I purchased a new MS Office 2013 last week from their website. apparently, it is a wide spread issue and but there is no solution to the problem  and no reply form the Microsoft :-(

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-02-10T00:05:20+00:00

    Please let me know if you (or anyone) have found an answer / better workaround.  Honestly all I would like is an explanation as to why this happens.  Our school is having the same issue.

    The workaround we have done is by copying them from a user account that has all the themes (someone else suggested doing so too – thank-you!).

    I figured since Raju S Das is a Microsoft employee, I’d try his suggestion of running MS Excel as an administrator. Surprisingly, that worked!  One problem, however; this is an unacceptable work around! I thought this was the point of UAC? Wouldn’t Microsoft frown at this? Anyways, after doing so, a whopping 20 themes showed up under “Page Layout” --> “Themes” while in Excel opposed to only 12 we were getting before. 

    I think if you run MS Excel as administrator (just once), then browse to C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\LiveContent\15\Managed\Document Themes\ and copy the folder named “1033” to the same spot in the affected user profile, it should work for you.  This worked for me. It works around the problem, but doesn’t answer my question as to “why?” this is happening… Oh well.

    Furthermore, we have students with their own personal devices running MS Office 2013 that have the same issue. This means it’s not only in our environment or the way we deploy the software.

    Here's some print screens if you run into a stump.

    1. Navigate to %programfiles%"Microsoft Office"\Office15
    2. Run "EXCEL.EXE" as administrator.

    1. Next, verify you have all the themes.

    1. If you're satisfied, go ahead and close MS Excel.
    2. Browse to C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates\LiveContent\15\Managed\Document Themes
    3. Go into the 1033 folder, you should have all your themes.  Copy the 1033 folder to your desktop if it has your required themes.

    1. Browse to your desired user profile.  c:\users"your user"... same path as above for administrator.
    2. Paste the 1033 folder and overwrite existing contents.
    3. Now, launch MS Excel as the user you're trying to use it with and see if the themes show up.  They did for me.

    Let me know if anyone has any questions.  Your mileage may vary.  We're running Windows 7 Enterprise x64 and MS Office Professional Plus 2013 x86.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-02-15T06:33:21+00:00

    If you are missing your themes in Office 2013, you can download them here:

    http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file\_id=66000972094194572765

    You should unzip them to your Microsoft Office document themes folder and then they will appear in themes again.

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