The dark mode concept is becoming increasingly popular. These days, all popular applications offer a dark mode or night mode. Microsoft Office applications have also been offering dark themes for years, but the light mode is turned on by default.
If you prefer the dark mode or dark theme, you can enable the same in Office Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other applications that are part of Microsoft Office.
In addition to manually turning on the dark mode, Office applications offer an option to automatically turn on or off the dark mode depending on your Windows 10 theme.
Turn dark mode on or off manually in Office Word, Excel & PowerPoint
Step 1: Open the Office Word, Excel, or PowerPoint application. We are using the Word program in this guide, but it works with other Office programs as well.
Step 2: Click on the File menu and then click on the Options to open the Word/Excel/PowerPoint Options dialog.
Step 3: In the Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office section, choose either Dark Gray or Black from the drop-down menu next to the Office Theme. I personally prefer Dark Gray over the full Black theme, but you can select a theme as per your requirement.
Step 4: Once a theme is selected, click on the OK button to save the setting and apply the newly selected theme. The new theme should be visible immediately. You may close the Options dialog now.
Tip: Ever after turning on the dark mode, the page background color remains the default white background. To change the page background color, navigate to Design > Page Color in Word.
Automatically change Office Word/Excel/PowerPoint theme to dark
If you do not want to manually turn on or off the dark mode in Office programs, you can configure the Office programs to automatically change to dark or light mode to be in sync with the Windows theme. That is, when configured, the Office theme will be automatically changed to dark when the dark mode is turned on in Windows 10. Use this feature if you do not want to use the dark mode always.
Step 1: In an Office program, click on the File menu and then click Options.
Step 2: In the resulting Options dialog, in the Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office section, select the Use system setting option from the drop-down menu next to the Office theme.
That is it! From now onwards, your Office application theme will be in sync with Windows 10 theme. By the way, if you are not sure about how to turn on the dark mode in Windows 10, refer to our how to turn on or off dark mode in Windows 10 guide.
Click the OK button to apply the change.
NOTE: When automatic switching is turned on, Office programs use the Black theme. If you would like to use the Dark gray theme instead, you need to manually select it (follow the steps in Method 1 mentioned above) by navigating Office Options > General tab > Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office section.