How to activate the dark theme on Microsoft Office and LibreOffice

Now that Windows 11 and the most recent versions of macOS offer dark modes, all well-known programs support dark themes. Even the most popular office suites for creating and editing documents, Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, cannot escape the trend of dark themes.

In the simple guide that we propose below, we will show you how to activate the dark theme on Microsoft Office and LibreOffice, showing you the steps necessary to adapt the theme of the two office suites to dark mode.

Activate dark theme on Microsoft Office

Switching to the dark theme in Microsoft Office is very simple to make it compatible with an entirely “dark” operating system. To continue, open any Office program (such as Microsoft Word), select File in the top left corner, Account in the bottom left corner, and Black from the drop-down menu under Office Theme.

Thus, any Office program, including Outlook, PowerPoint, and Excel, will have a dark mode.

As shown in the guide that is linked at the beginning of the article, you can also select Use system settings from the same drop-down menu to force Office to use the dark theme only when you activate the dark mode on Windows 11.

Activate dark theme in LibreOffice

On LibreOffice, you can change the theme of the applications or modify only some graphic elements to adapt all or part of the program to the dark theme active on the computer.

To apply the dark theme to LibreOffice, open, from the Start menu, one of the programs associated with the suite (Writer, Calc, or Impress), press the Tools menu at the top, click on Options, go to the Personalization menu, and press on the Dark theme.

The upper part of the program bar will be colored black, but not all elements of the application will be dark-themed. To complete the LibreOffice transformation, let’s go to the Application Colors menu, press the drop-down menu next to the Scheme item at the top and select LibreOffice Dark.

After this change, most of the LibreOffice interface will show the dark theme, with the exception of the upper toolbar; to color the toolbar black too, let’s go to the View menu, click on User Interface and select Single Toolbar, Compact Grouped Bar and Single Contextual to apply the dark theme to the whole program.

If you want to customize LibreOffice to the maximum, you will have maximum freedom, like with any good open-source program available on the market.

Conclusions

Even professional programs like Office and LibreOffice can have a very eye-catching dark theme that fits perfectly with modern operating systems’ dark themes. The dark theme applied when writing a document can be very useful for resting the eyes at night since the background will be black and the writing will be white (i.e., a combination of colors that won’t tire the eyes less).