If you’re like most people, you probably have a few color schemes set up in your office. You might have a standard workstation color scheme, or you might use a different color for each task or document. But what if you want to change the office color scheme permanently? Well, there’s no need to go through all of the trouble of setting up a new color scheme and then having to remember it every time you want to change it. You can simply use a registry hack to set up your office’s office color scheme without any hassle. To do this, you’ll need to first create a new registry key. This key will be used to store your office’s Office 2007 color scheme. The name of this key should be something like “HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Policies\System”. Next, you’ll need to add the following value to this registry key: “ColorScheme=MyNewOfficeColorScheme”. This value will be used as the Office 2007 colorscheme when your computer starts up. Now that you’ve added this value to your registry key, it’s time to start using it! To change the Office 2007 colorscheme, just open up Windows Explorer and type “colorscheme” into the address bar. Then click on the “change” button at the top of the window. You’ll now see a list of all of your current Office 2007 colorschemes. Choose one of these colorschemes and click on the “change” button at the top of the window again. This time, make sure that “ColorScheme=MyNewOfficeColorScheme” is set as the Office 2007 colorscheme!
Of course it’s much simpler to just set the color scheme using the GUI, but if you are like me you save a list of registry hacks that you apply to all new machines, so it still comes in handy.
Manual Registry Hack
Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:
Find the key on the right-hand side called Theme and set it to one of these values, depending on the color you want:
Blue: 1 Silver: 2 Black: 3
That’s all there is to it.
Using a Group Policy Template
If you are on a corporate network and want to set the color across all the computers on your network, you can use this custom ADM template for Group Policy, created by our excellent reader Stephen.
I’m just assuming that you know how to import this if you are an IT guy.
Downloadable Registry Hack
Simply download, extract, and then double-click on the .reg file with the color that you want.
Download SetOffice2007Color registry hacks
