Office 2016 keeps reverting color theme back to Colorful

Anonymous
2015-10-05T15:13:00+00:00

I installed Office 2016 as an upgrade to 2013.  Put the color scheme on grey (because annoyingly the awesome Black went away sometime in the preview.)  

Now I have a weird issue where every time I close all of the 2016 applications and then reopen one of the applications, the theme has changed from grey to colorful.  This applies to reboots or just closing them all and then later opening one back up.  Oddly as well today (10/5/2015) I walked away from the computer to talk to a co-worker in the next office.  When I came back, it was on colorful again.  However that is the only time it has changed itself while open.

It seems to work correctly when it is set to Grey.  So for instance, say I open Outlook and change the theme to Grey.  When I open Word or Excel, they are also Grey as they should be.

So I'm just throwing that out there as a potential bug

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  1. Anonymous
    2017-05-26T13:59:45+00:00

    I have the same problem with Office 2016 on Windows 10. Got new workstation in January and it was FINE. Then about 2 weeks ago an update was installed and now it keeps going back to colorful. I have it on black because it causes less eye strain. Oh well....guess I'll just sue Microsoft when the eye strain starts affecting my health...stupid idiots. Close the holes in your software....don't take away functionality.

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-05-01T22:51:31+00:00

    Yes. In the last week or so I've found that my chosen option of Black for the Office themes will change back to colorful most (but not all) days when I start my PC after a nightly shutdown.

    I use Outlook 2016 predominantly, however some days I use Excel and a few other programs from the Office suite.

    I'm no fan of the ribbon, nor some of the other layout features of Office. The limited color schemes on offer are all problematic in either minor or major ways when used in conjunction with the current interface design. In the past we had a lot more options for customisation, and it allowed the more picky of us to find our preferred setup. Obviously not everyone has the same viewpoint, but to have the system keep coming back to the 'colorful' scheme just keeps highlighting the removal of a previously handy feature.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-04-17T21:26:14+00:00

    Hard to roll this out enterprise wide with a year old bug.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-04-04T16:46:04+00:00

    I don't connect to a Windows server so do I still have an Office roaming profile?

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  5. Anonymous
    2017-04-03T08:26:44+00:00

    I have this problem consistently.

    Windows 10 Pro.

    Office version 2016 MSO (16.0.7830.1018) 32-bit.

    It seems Office, regardless of which actual product, is doing 2 things:

    1. setting the registry key value "HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\UI Theme" to 0 upon startup.
    2. even-though the value of this key is set to 3 by way of manually setting it, sometimes office is ignoring this value. 

    I am not using multiple machines nor do I have multiple Microsoft accounts.

    I hope this helps someone at Microsoft figure this out.

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