11.28
First time I saw Office 2013 I thought “damn that’s very white”. It’s actually painfully white. As a picture, it lacks contrast (dark colours being closer to black, and light colours being closer to white) and a tonal range (because it’s almost all white by default).
I googled for a solution and nothing official from Microsoft appeared but I did find instructions in a forum.
- Open up an Office 2013 program
- Click on File –> Office Account or File –> Account, depending on the program you’ve launched
- Change Office Theme from White to one of the two other options.
Here’s how the default setting looks in Office Account:
That appears like this:
Changing the Office Theme to Light Grey has this effect:
That’s subtle. If you want more contrast/tone then go with Dark Grey:
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Cheers for the heads up.
Still a pretty poor show from microsoft this time. Seems very reminiscent of the decision to grey scale everything in visual studio. I just don’t understand why they would put so much colour into Windows 8 & “the modern ui” to then completely strip office.
I propose renaming the themes to “bleak”, “pale” and “depressing”
> I propose renaming the themes to “bleak”, “pale” and “depressing”
Great proposal, Dan,
the best I’ve heard!!! So much effect with so little effort – if I were Balmer I would have promoted you to a VP immediately :)