Our office just converted.  The themes (even dark grey) give me headaches.  I briefly used it in my old job and was miserable.  Are there any third party vendor add-ons or anything else I can do.  It's terrible for someone who has to use these products all day long.

As far as I know, there is no such add-on. The only way to get a darker background is to switch Windows to a high-contrast theme and to set the colors you want. But that will affect all other applications too.

By the way, Office 2016 (due to be released later this year) will have a "black" theme.

I'm a technical writer. I use this dog-awful waste product all day long. I had NO choice.

There was a product we liked. It was Office 2003 and Win XP.

The Office 2013 and Office 365 user interfaces are an egregious violation of good usability and human factors.

Since the Office 2007, the stupid tabbed ribbon has not been improved.

Microsoft has AGAIN returned to the face-saving ways and is a bad agent as during the first go around of this, Win / Office 95.

Dog-awful code quality.

There does not exist any IT security policy on the plant to contains dog-awful Office 2013 and Win 8.1.

Office 2013/Win 8.1: Insulting and Lewd.