In an effort to keep all us little monkeys up-to-date, we were all just upgraded to Office 2007 here at work and the first thing I noticed was the nasty default “toothpaste” color scheme. Don’t get me wrong… blue is one of my favorite colors, but that shade was just plain offensive. And so I proceeded to search for the “Themes” option to make a quick update. Unfortunately though, Office 2007 is different enough that even if my very existence had depended on it updating the color scheme, I wouldn’t have been able to locate where to make the change. Luckily for you though, I’ve now located this elusive option and I now share this information with you (it’s much easier than I was making it).
First, open any Office 2007 application (besides Outlook) and click on the nifty new “Office Orb” in the upper left-hand corner.
Second, at the bottom of the menu that appears, click on “-application name- Options” (where -application name- equals the app you happen to have open).
Third, on the default “Popular” tab of the new options window, select your color scheme from the drop down menu on the right. Please note that this option changes the color for all Office 07 apps so you can’t set each to a separate color scheme.
There you go. That’s it! You can choose from one of the follow schemes so hopefully you can find one that works with your windows theme. I’m just glad to be rid of “Zesty Cresty Blue”.
Thanks! Having to look at that pastel blue one more day and i think that I would have puked blue
I don’t understand why Office has its own themes in the first place. Why doesn’t it just adopt your desktop theme like all other apps (including Internet Explorer)? It really makes the Office team look like arrogant bastards, which they may well be.
Office has always had it’s own theme/widget engine. That’s because they need Office to look and feel the same no matter what Windows it’s running on.
Office 2007 will look and behave the same on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, etc.
The same was true for Office 2000, XP and 2003.
So, I guess making sure the color scheme matched the OS color scheme was low on the list of important things to do. I think the “Black” scheme in Office 2007 looks just fine. Easy on the eyes, not too cluttered.