too blue

I have been resisting moving from MS Office 2003 to any of the more recent versions. However,  my new machine at home has Windows 7 and the newer MS Office.  So I have to grin and bear it.

The main reason I didn't want to upgrade is that I hate-hate-hate the "ribbon".  It's ugly, it's cluttered, and it seems to encompass a work flow orthogonal  to mine.

However, it struck me after I had changed the default blue wallpaper on my home machine to the Hubble Deep Field photo, that another reason I dislike the latest Office is that it is so very very BLUE.

a much more soothing wallpaper image

Ah!  Surely I can change that?  After much hunting (did I say that I hate the interface?), I discovered a "Word Options" button skulking at the bottom of the main menu (you know, that absolutely crucial menu that hides behind a little circular icon that looks nothing like a menu button?)  I clicked it, and I found that one of the "popular options" allows me to change the colour scheme.  Result!

What, a whole three options?  What an embarrassment of riches!

I had a look at "black":

Better. But my goth period is long past.  What about "silver":

Much more civilised, if somewhat ... grey.

So, I've now set the option to "silver" (I set it in MSWord, and it magically propagated to Excel and Powerpoint), and I now only hate it when I look at the ribbon (which, of course, I have to do every time I need to do anything more complicated than plain typing, ie all the time), rather than looking anywhere else on the screen.  I suppose that counts as a win.