We are currently planning to migrate from Office 2007. Our first step was to decide to skip Office 2010 and go straight to 2013.

Unfortunately the three themes available have produced massively negative feedback, to such an extent that we are not prepared to roll out Office 2013.

However if there is any chance that the issue of themes will be addressed, we will continue with our testing of Office 2013, personally I'd prefer to move to the newer version of Office rather than 2010 as in theory, that should be the more productive move.

Unfortunately, it is not worth dedicating testing time to Office 2013 if the themes are to remain the same, our time will be better spent testing Office 2010 and planning that migration.

Is there are any news on whether the themes will be addressed?

All the information Microsoft has given us to this point is that there are no new themes planned at this time. I'm sure Tony or another moderator will pop in here and lay that exact form letter response on you with no further information.

Funny enough, Office 2010 is actually the more productive move. They've removed countless features in Office 2013 including powerpivot, integrated Windows search, today screen, e-mails synch backwards now, etc.

no one with MS is talking. But there are too many complaints to ignore it.

And that's the real problem. We can see probably 1000 posts now complaining about the themes, yet all we get on these forums is form letter responses. This has been going on for months now. Nobody can seem to contact anyone with any knowledge and everything is "by design". By really, crappy design apparently - and zero information to backup any of those designs. There are no real study groups that signed off on these changes - that's a complete lie.

I dare anyone to show me a study report from any group of people that were shown Office 2013 and said, "yeah, black and white and fuzzy grey! That's the ticket! That's what I want in my next office! Oh, and please emphasize the white space to cause massive headaches. Thank you! This is perfect!"

So, yeah. Bravo Microsoft. Just keep feeding us the form-letter responses, claim your powerless to find out any information from the actual teams who have knowledge,  fall back on the standard "it's by design", never post a "we're working on it, stay tuned for the next update in a month", and never respond again to a thread. Brilliant plan! Brilliant!

Of course, in the real world if people acted like this at my company they'd be fired. We don't treat paying customers this poorly. These forums provide terrible support. You need to get the Office team involved in communicating this issue better. They need to have a representative on these forums that can actually answer things with knowledge and treat us like respected customers.

To be fair, the Microsoft people working here aren't the decision makers or the designers. They only answer questions; they don't know if the colors will be changing and if they did, they would not be allowed to say. The text of the form letter is the correct answer and it's silly to retype something every time just to reword it.

To be fair, the Microsoft people working here aren't the decision makers or the designers. They only answer questions; they don't know if the colors will be changing and if they did, they would not be allowed to say. The text of the form letter is the correct answer and it's silly to retype something every time just to rewo

If you "want answers", you need to open a support case - if you have a retail version, you get at least 30 days free support (I think it's 90 but I'm not 100% sure). But I'd be surprised if they tell you any more than what you've already seen in the form letter. And because they've had *a lot* of feedback (all bad!) about the colors, calling support to register your disapproval isn't necessary at this point.

If any additional colors are added, I would not expect it before SP1. That is just wild guess based on past experience though. Time will tell...

The support groups attached to the product teams browse these forums looking for pain points and problems to add to the database - they don't reply to many threads though, and only the ones they need more info from to investigate bugs.

(Turning monitor brightness down helps a lot.)

Thanks for the responses, it seems that the Office 2010 migration is the only sensible step for us at this time and then we'll have to see what the future holds.

Turning down the monitor brightness works for individuals but it doesn't work so well when you're rolling out a product company wide.

We expect some pain when we migrate because it's always different and some people don't like change, we can ride out those issues, well we have in the past, but the issue with themes is too large a hurdle at this point in time.

Thanks for the links to blogs to keep an eye on.

I certainly think there's room for a more constructive dialogue with the devs but this probably isn't the platform for it. I agree with a lot of your frustrations over this issue, it may be useful if we could see the longer term thinking behind these changes, I don't see any short term advantages, which is why it looks like we'll migrate to Office 2010 instead.

Fortunately we are on a SA contract so we have flexibility.

I agree that migration is disruptive, this is why I wanted to look at Office 2013, as this should mean we won't need to migrate again for quite a while.

One of the reasons we want to migrate is due to the corporate support options, Lync and Sharepoint intergration have became more appealing to us and unfortunately Office 2007 has limited intergration with Lync.

Most of us providing replies, even the MVP's don't have access to program managers. So we don't know future plans, other than what we've read in various media reports.

The design issue, lower resolution and higher contrast is IMHO part of an overall design strategy.  If you compare Office 2003 to 2007 to 2010 to 2013 UI's you'll see a steady degradation in resolution and definition. And the 2013 colors tie into the whole Win8 Metro/Retro/Smartphone-on-the-desktop look

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=E9A78C332557256F!297&authkey=!AGZ-GhCx9Q1ZUug JPG comparing color schemes from 2003-2013(RTM)

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=E9A78C332557256F!298&authkey=!AN36Nw-TqH6py2M Original DOC comparing Color Schemes from 2003-2013 (RTM) allows you to zoom in for more details

Jensen Harris 2007 Blog - Ribbon UI rationalizations

Microsoft's traditional Windows and Office interfaces have grown more complex and inscrutable over time. (Microsoft always claims it conducts extensive user interface research, but still revamps the UI every chance it gets. It must be using a different species of alien each time.) In a touch-oriented environment, rows and rows of small, undecipherable icons just don't work. Someone at Microsoft seems to have realized that, and perhaps Office for ARM will be truly usable. That alone could move many users away from the "heavy" x86 version of Office and, thus, Windows.

Unfortunately, MS has so many customers that they apparently have adopted a very hands off attitude on customer input. The only input they acknowledge is stuff they explicitly ask for.

I think the person you want to contact is Jensen Harris. I'm sure I've recently seen articles/blogs by him on the current UI. All I can suggest is you find

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/table-of-contents.aspx This is an organized Table Of Contents to a large collection of links to MS Dev Team Blogs about the design and building of the 2007 ribbon. A LOT of reading, but interesting to understand the underlying (il)logic of the Ribbon

In other words, there are zero options available to any mere mortal person or company that would provide any options for two-way feedback with Microsoft on the issue. Even their MVP's are mystified as to how to communicate effectively and can only direct us to some other blog written about the ribbon interface from the year 2008 that wasn't able to solve the issue either.

In other words, there are zero options available to any mere mortal person or company that would provide any options for two-way feedback with Microsoft on the issue. Even their MVP's are mystified as to how to communicate effectively and can only direct us to some other blog written about the ribbon interface from the year 2008 that wasn't able to solve the issue either.

MVPs have direct access to the program managers for our expertise. It's not needed for this problem though, the program managers read these threads, they know the colors are a problem.

The managers read these forums, see an issue raised 1000 times about their product, and never communicate with anyone in these forums? I'm sorry Diane, thanks for responding but I'm failing to see your point or how this makes the Office team look good in any light.

Why would they want to reply here - they'd only get browbeat for a "canned reply". :)  Plus replying is a time-sucker that takes them away from fixing problems. 

Why would they want to reply here - they'd only get browbeat for a "canned reply". :)  Plus replying is a time-sucker that takes them away from fixing problems. 

Yes, because we can see how much not responding to forum threads has really helped Electronic Arts as of late as well. What a brilliant strategy to not ever respond to any forum posts regarding your own product.

The issue has been around for close to a year and nary a sign of a solution. If they were planning one it would not be so time-consuming to post a short notice saying "ah, we'll have the colours by ...". They need only post once and let users answer each other afterwards.

The fact they have not even done that probably means they have no plans to correct this issue. You have to wonder if there's anyone in charge at the MS Marketing department.

How hard can it be to release a new theme? Seems to me developers could make their own themes in older versions of Outlook.

I bet a new management and design team came up with Office 2013 and Windows 8 and they havent been fired yet, so it is not OK for MS staff to criticize them. Eventually when IT Professionals abandon MS for other platforms and profits fall, maybe they will finally listen. It is very clear, MS needs to fire and remove all staff involved in design changes for Office 2013 and Windows 8, and have the team that created Office 2007 take over. At a miminum they need to add an option to chagne the styling to be like Office 2007 or 2010.