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
    2017-10-03T12:57:43+00:00

    Hello!

    Thanks for posting on the Microsoft Community, and we're sorry that you're experiencing this issue. We have identified the source of this problem and our engineering team is working on a fix. I'll post back once the update containing the fix is released.

    Thanks,

    Michelle V

    Office Team

    so this reply was march of 2016 and it's now October of 2017 - WHERE IS THE FIX?????

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-09-03T02:56:08+00:00

    The 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\UI Theme = 4' registry hack doesn't stick, keeps going back to Dark Grey or whatever.

    Surely it can't be hard to reinstate "Black" to the list in Office Theme, call it "Really, really dark grey', if you really, really must. 

    MS's current strategy for Office seems to be one of impairment, rather than improvement. I am not thinking of the ribbon interface (Fluent), for me that was a huge advance.  But I am thinking of the crippled spell & grammar check 'dialogue' - not!   How can one switch between the Spelling/Grammar panes and main body of the text - without using a mouse or something similar.  For various reasons some of us eschew using them.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-08-24T18:17:09+00:00

    Could not "fix it" as no errors appeared.  But my color is still white only, no matter what I chose.  No font color choices, naturally, as every color chosen still results in white only.

    I think this is most likely a Windows issue in combination with something in Office. Why? - Because Office behaves normally, with all colors, on my Windows 10 laptop.  Installed the same copy there.

    Oh well, guess I'll live with this.  Thanks.

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-08-24T16:58:29+00:00

    It looks like that worked, thanks!

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  5. Anonymous
    2017-08-24T16:34:56+00:00

    I had this before and then it suddenly appeared after a few months (after password change)

    try the below ...

    open outlook / select file / select office account 

    make sure there are no errors listed,  if there are select "fix me"

    Set Office theme and background here

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