Here is a question from Scott:
In a recent Teams meeting i participated, the meeting host was sharing a Word Document through the Teams app. One thing that caught my eye was the fact that his Word interface was completely black, instead of the typical white background. Seemed much more easy on the eye that we typically use in our company. Let’s say that i want to change my Word layout to dark. Is it something i will need to have the IT folks do, or can it be done by a user?
Thanks for the question, see our answer below.
Change the Word background to dark mode
You can easily change your Microsoft Word (or any other Office app such as Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint etc) theme to a darker or more colorful layout with ease. Although you can set your theme to dark in each of the apps, once done, the setting will apply to all Office apps. This will work on Windows 10 & 11 and macOS versions of Office.
Here’s the process to follow:
- Launch Microsoft Word
- Hit the File menu
- Then select the Options
- The Word Options dialog will come up.
- In the Office Theme drop down select Dark (as shown below).
- Hit OK.
- The Word layout theme, was changed to Dark.
Change Word from dark to light mode
You can obviously move back then needed to light mode by using the same process outlined in the previous section. In the Options || Word Settings dialog, just go ahead and select White.
Word dark mode with White pages
Depending on your Word version, switching to dark mode could have switched also your document canvas color to black. If you want to keep the white background for your document, and still use a darker Word theme please proceed as following:
- Open Microsoft Word
- Hit File, then select Options
- Then, next to the Office Theme drop-down, hit Disable Dark Mode.
Note: A new Microsoft feature allows to do this setting right from the View menu. Depending of your version you can use the Switch Modes option to quickly disable dark mode on the document canvas.