Hello:

I recently installed Office 2013 for a group of users I support.  They have a number of complaints but one of the biggest is the available themes.  After much complaining they will tolerate the dark gray theme, but they absolutely cannot stand the white theme.  Unfortunately we are encountering a problem where the theme reverts to white every time an Office app is closed.

I've done some testing - if I change the theme to dark gray, close all the apps, then re-open an app, I can see the dark gray theme for a moment but then it reverts.  I've looked at the registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\UI Theme

and I can see that the dark gray setting (2) gets reset back to (0) when an app is opened.  I've looked into GPO settings but there doesn't seem to be a GPO setting for a 2013 theme at the moment.

We are using Office 2013 on Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64-bit (fully patched).

I haven't tried uninstalling and re-installing Office yet but honestly if I go that route I might as well end the pain and install Office 2010.

Any advice on how to troubleshoot appreciated.

As you might not be aware of this: as soon as an Office Application starts, and a user is logged in, it automatically synchronises the account settings with what's saved in the cloud. If there is no user logged in, it either reverts to the default values, or it keeps the old values (I did not find when it keeps, or when it actually resets though, sorry).

What I think the issue is here: you change the UI scheme, but either don't set it in "File > Account" or Office can't successfully synchronise with the cloud once you've edited it.

So what could you do:
- check if the user is logged in correctly while using the application.
- check if the data is getting synchronised to Microsoft's cloud

I hope this reply helped you, if it did, please mark this reply as the solution!
~ Mathias

Mathias:

Much thanks for your reply.  I was not aware of that feature and when I checked the settings under "Account" they seemed to be correct.  However I was not logged in to Skydrive.  After logging in the problem seems to have gone away (on at least one machine).  Not sure if this is my error or some problem with the way Office interacts with a Skydrive account but at least I know where to start troubleshooting.

But you've solved my immediate problem so thanks again...

Mathias - I can't seem to find a link that allows me to mark your reply as the answer.  The thread was posted as a question so not sure what I'm doing wrong but probably user error.  I'll check back later, maybe a temporary server issue.