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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
Processes in Microsoft 365 for setting up Office apps, redeeming product keys, and activating licenses.
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Likewise, this solved the problem for me as well, thank you.
i have office 365 and have this same issue --> change to gray works fine, close and reopen back to colorful....
Check under "File" -> "Office Account" Mine was asking to update my login. That didn't work so I signed out and back in and now all acts normally.
My guess is that the office theme is account based and if office has an issue connecting while opening it reverts back to the default.
It's been a year now, this should be fixed.
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
Elizabeth seemed to have a consistent set of steps to get Word into the wrong state, but like you pointed out there's more cases where Office applications can change their theme unexpectedly, and this is frustrating.
Your Office theme is a roaming setting, so the expected behavior if you're logged in with the same account in multiple places (e.g., on your desktop and on your laptop) is for the theme to sync to all of your machines. For example, if you change your theme on Machine A, the next time you open an Office application on Machine B will have the old theme (while all your settings are synced in the background). The second time you open an Office application on Machine B, it should have the same theme you picked on Machine A.
Like you said, this doesn't always work. To help us troubleshoot this, it would be really helpful if you could provide us with the exact Office version number (and if you use Office on multiple machines, we'll need their version numbers as well). This will help us narrow down the possible causes for this intermittent problem, and once we can reproduce this on our end we can release a fix in the next update.
In the meantime, if you would like to disable roaming settings altogether, you can go to File > Options, and check the "Always use these values regardless of sign in to Office"(it's next to the "Office Theme" dropdown).
Note that this will disable all roaming settings, so if you use Office on multiple machines, features like Word Resume Reading Position, PowerPoint Last Viewed Slide, and your Most Recently Used document list will not be synced across machines.