What the heck were you all thinking? Were you EVEN thinking?

Office 2013?? Really? This is the BEST you can do?

It is BUTT UGLY.

Where is the setting to get rid of the FLAT and UGLY look ?? Make it look and feel more like Office 2010?

Thanks

Hi,

We can change the Office theme as introduced in the following link:

Change the Office theme

http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/outlook-help/change-the-office-theme-HA103355148.aspx

I understand you may not like how Office 2013 looks currently, I apologize if the appearance doesn't make you happy. If changing the Office theme can't meet your request, I suggest you submit Feedback by pressing Ctrl + Alt + 7 or Ctrl + Alt + 8, Microsoft will definitely regard users' voice as important and may improve the products to make more people like them.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

Hi,

We can change the Office theme as introduced in the following link:

Change the Office theme

http://office.microsoft.com/en-001/outlook-help/change-the-office-theme-HA103355148.aspx

I understand you may not like how Office 2013 looks currently, I apologize if the appearance doesn't make you happy. If changing the Office theme can't meet your request, I suggest you submit Feedback by pressing Ctrl + Alt + 7 or Ctrl + Alt + 8, Microsoft will definitely regard users' voice as important and may improve the products to make more people like them.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

Oh yes, I did see those. You have three choices: "Drab", "Dismal" and "Kill me now".

Thank you for the reply. 

Why focus product development on making the product uglier when you could be focusing on making the product better? It's not just the poorly chosen colors, but also having removed any sense of depth or texture, and, good grief, capitalizing the menu items. The colors are awfully muted -- contrast has been minimized. The colors should be part of improving communication, not an impediment to it.

We teach our 10 year olds not to communicate in all-caps -- it's like yelling through your computer. It imparts a very amateurish look.

How about fixing the behavior when you have multi-line text in Excel that wraps and you reduce the width of the column -- the bottom part of the text disappears, and it is a big editing headache to get them all visible.

How about fixing the style sheets in Word. Nothing works well there -- I spend more time losing my battle trying to get it to do what I want instead of what it thinks I should have.

This is your answer?  Seriously?

John is right!  I feel like I've walked from a nice, warm library office into an all-white, highly fluorescent, cold, open aircraft hangar with my desk in the middle.  It's completely washed out and feels like we're in a prison cell.

Functionality?  Very very good.  Feel?  God-Awful!!!

We have just been updated and I have to say that I see someone driving MS into a ravine.  I went to the link they have for themes and i have to say you get the option of 3 totally (to use the OPs) butt ugly visuals. It seems that just changing the color is all there is.  And with the current view of their products I can understand why they feel that way.  I would have thought they would have learned from the great release of Win8 and metro that users really don't like this look.  Especially on the desktop.

Why oh why can others create decent looks and MS continues to fail at the easiest part of the product.

I agree, it is terrible.

I was hoping to get a better theme by searching on-line. I am an Office user since Win 3.1 and come from an arts/graphics family background (although I'm a science consultant so hence the heavy Office use). I am continually dismayed at the poor choices and lack of Microsoft response to people pointing out their poor choices. I could start a blog on those alone but can I say my first impression of Office 365 that I downloaded today was that my brand new high-spec computer had somehow gone into Safe mode.

I tried to change the theme and it allows silly graphics in the background or white, light grey and dark grey. The font, colours and depth/contrast/shading are all so wrong I simply cant imagine a project team at Microsoft looking at all the alternatives and coming up with this as their favorite. I think most people are understanding of different taste but so much of 8.1 and Office 365 feels like pushing a design philosophy ahead of function that it appears arrogant and disrespectful of their clients. 

I believe they have gone to this graphic form in order to keep it looking like Office 365.  Office 365 is likely the same order of ugliness so that it works faster over the internet.  This is the same reason old mainframe computers held on to MS-DOS years ago.  They were staying with ugly in favor of having enough processing power.

More beautiful graphics means that more graphic info would have to be exchanged across an internet connection when using MS Office 365.  For some people with a slow internet connection better graphics (like we all used to have with Office 2007) would make Office 365 too slow and cumbersome to use.

I don't think Microsoft will be quick to admit this, though.

I just received a new work laptop that contains Office 365, or as I call it "Orifice" 365.  What a steaming pile of dog excrement!  I have nothing more to add because everyone else in this thread echos my thoughts exactly.  What the hell happened Microsoft.  Or perhaps it should be called "MicroSloth" because it feels like any degree of real innovation and the ability to turn out a nice product in both performance and a nice, polished and gorgeous UI has died a long time ago.  Perhaps MS should bring Bill back?  At least it seemed that he had the vision of what a great product should be.  I was never a big Apple fan due to the fact that I felt like Steve Jobs had me by my wallet and my "boys" but I give him top marks in knowing what great design, look and feel are.  Perhaps MS should take a page from his book.  And windows 8/10...Oh man! don't get me started!

• Edited by TurnerBurn 13 hours 11 minutes ago

I just received a new work laptop that contains Office 365, or as I call it "Orifice" 365.  What a steaming pile of dog excrement!  I have nothing more to add because everyone else in this thread echos my thoughts exactly.  What the hell happened Microsoft.  Or perhaps it should be called "MicroSloth" because it feels like any degree of real innovation and the ability to turn out a nice product in both performance and a nice, polished and gorgeous UI has died a long time ago.  Perhaps MS should bring Bill back?  At least it seemed that he had the vision of what a great product should be.  I was never a big Apple fan due to the fact that I felt like Steve Jobs had me by my wallet and my "boys" but I give him top marks in knowing what great design, look and feel are.  Perhaps MS should take a page from his book.  And windows 8/10...Oh man! don't get me started!

• Edited by TurnerBurn Thursday, June 25, 2015 6:18 PM

These themes are horrible