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
    2017-02-03T22:30:42+00:00

    Hi Elizabeth,

    Sorry your Office theme is changing unexpectedly. I tried the steps you mentioned but cannot reproduce the problem. Could you provide more details or screenshots for how to get Word into the wrong theme?

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  2. Anonymous
    2017-02-04T17:17:24+00:00

    Hello Hugo

    Your request "Could you provide more details or screenshots for how to get Word into the wrong theme?"

    That is the million dollar questions.  I (we) have no idea how to get Word into the wrong theme.  It does it all by AI self.  The question at hand is how to STOP MS products (for me it is Outlook, Word, Excel, Publisher) from changing theme without a human saying to do so.

    The issue I have is, I want all my programs/apps to use White as the them color but the software keeps changing the theme to Colorful.  This happens without a pattern, not all the time, but enough of the time to be annoying.  It may or may not be related to only opening files from my O365 SharePoint Sites.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-02-04T18:01:18+00:00

    In another similar question the user identified that they were using multiple computers with a single email account log in. Logging out of Office and shutting all of the applications, starting one and setting the desired theme seemed to fix the problem for them. 

    So it suggests that one cause of this problem is the settings on the different computers were being picked up from the computer and saved in the user profile associated with the email account used to log in to Office 2016/365

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  4. Anonymous
    2017-02-07T18:08:27+00:00

    As DaveJermakiansaid the problem is how to STOP MS Office products from changing the color theme.

    I just had a case where I opened OneNote and it came up with the last document I had open but it opened with the colorful theme. When I closed OneNote (without making changes) and re-opened, it opened properly with the white theme.

    I suspect that this may have to do with opening shared documents (this OneNote document is updated by several people). The change in theme seems to happen when someone else updated the document after I closed it last. The case with documents opened from SharePoint is similar where I'm opening a document that someone else recently edited.

    And to add to the confusion, it may only be if the last person to edit the document had the colorful theme selected.

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  5. Anonymous
    2017-02-07T18:15:57+00:00

    In another similar question the user identified that they were using multiple computers with a single email account log in. Logging out of Office and shutting all of the applications, starting one and setting the desired theme seemed to fix the problem for them. 

    So it suggests that one cause of this problem is the settings on the different computers were being picked up from the computer and saved in the user profile associated with the email account used to log in to Office 2016/365

    So then, the question is, will/can MS fix this and if so, when.  Seems reasonable to expect that the settings of one user would not be transferred to another user.

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