Office 2016 keeps reverting color theme back to Colorful

Hello everyone,

I've been dealing with this spontaneously-reverting color scheme issue for several months now with my Microsoft Surface Pro 4.  Everyday at work, multiple times a day, I change the color scheme back to my preferred Dark Gray and it consistently reverts back to the default Colorful scheme (aka blue).  Soooo annoying!  I've scoured the web with endless searches of this issue in hopes of finding a forum with the solution... but to no avail (*sad face w/a tear of hopelessness*)

HOWEVER, today, I believe I discovered the cause of this elusive troublemaker!  For the past 90 minutes, I haven't experienced the spontaneous color change and all my Office applications now open as Dark Gray too.  Here's what I found and did...

1. From Outlook, go to FILE > OFFICE ACCOUNT
2. Make sure that the Office Background dropdown and Office Theme dropdown reflect your preference.
3. From this same screen, I noticed what I believe was the culprit causing the issue... Say hello to Microsoft One Drive.

Microsoft's One Drive service was trying to connect to my Office account.  At one time, I did a free trial of Microsoft Office 365 for my Mac.  I may have activated that One Drive service inadvertently or something to that effect but I eventually cancelled the free trial.  When I cancelled the free trial is when I began to experience the spontaneous Office Theme reversion back to default. 

Just cancel / stop the One Drive service from attempting to connect to your Office Account.  Hopefully that fixes the issue.  Seems to have fixed it for me.

Well, it has been a year since your post and I still have the problem!!

Thank you! This pointed me in the right direction.  On the Office Account page there was an error occurring so that my settings were not being saved.  The error message was right at the top.  I had to log into office 365 for the setting to be saved.  BTW, I was able to set the same setting in the Office page of Excel as well.

It stopped doing it for me when I realized I was not logged in to the Office 365 system.  In the upper right corner of Excel, you will see your name.  Mine had a trouble triangle next to it.  It was because I had changed my password, and our Office 365 is integrated with our Active Directory so every time I change the password at work, it broke the Office applications login.  Check next to your name to see if you have this issue with Office 365.  I hope this helps.

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

Well, its been more than two years since your post (3/4/16 to 4/25/18 now) and the problem still hasn't been resolved.  I've been using 2016 for about 3 weeks now and every morning my theme resets from the "Dark Gray" I selected to "Colorful."

I also agree strongly with another post that it was a poor choice to change all the icons to white in the "Dark Gray" and "Black" themes.  Please make the icon colors consistent throughout the themes, or make an option to select  white or normal colors.

One other problem as long as we are on the subject.  In the "Black" theme, reminders come up with a light gray on white which is a strain on the eyes to read.  I love the black theme the best but can't use it due to this poor color combination.  Please fix.  Thanks.