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Yesterday I got a report that Excel 2019 changed appearance. The green title bar is not there, the icons in the top left changed, the quick access toolbar got turned off, and the ribbon has padding and curved edges. I was asked to undo this unexpected change.

  1. The selected 'Colorful' theme is not stored consistently between Excel and other Office apps.
  2. The quick access bar contents and appearance have not been adjusted to the new theme.
  3. All checked PCs have the same patch number. Accounts seem affected randomly.
  4. Changing the theme setting once is enough to trigger the issue, but only for Excel.

The title bar color thing seems to be caused by broken theme support. When I open Word and Excel's 'Account' page which holds the theme setting, and set one to 'White' or 'Dark grey', both windows update in real time to the correct theme. But when I select 'Colorful' or 'System default' (which sets 'Colorful'), the other window does not change. If I only open Word or Excel and make the change, then open the other, the selected theme name is blank. The application then falls back to 'System default', and if that fails, falls back again to 'White'. This explains why the title bar wasn't showing color anymore.

The title bar icons have changed from just a blank click spot for the window's context menu, to showing the application icon. A save button was also added. The quick access toolbar was turned off, it has to be turned back on and then moved from bottom to top. Then I notice two anomalies - the toolbar by default also has a save button (so now there's two next to each other), and its contents are not properly vertically aligned with the title bar. I also notice that the title bar is bigger, the spacing changed from 10px to 17px. The quick bar did not have its spacing adjusted, which explains why its contents are misaligned.

I have not looked into colors, but Excel color is abnormal is complaining that the color palette has changed for the 'Dark grey' theme to a fully black one. So there might be even more theme inconsistencies. You can see screenshots of the new and old UI layout there for reference.

What's annoying is that all PCs I checked are on the same patch version, updated to latest. Some accounts are affected, others aren't. On one PC, Administrator is bugged, the User isn't. On another, Administrator is fine, but the User has the problem. Both Excel 2016 and 2019 are affected. I just finished installing a brand new Office 2019, and Administrator immediately got it. So I'm not sure if it affects whoever last ran the Office updater or what.

Further testing shows that if I take an account which does not yet have this problem, and I touch the theme setting in any way, I suddenly receive all these problems - changed UI, removed quick bar, broken theme selection, etc. So this may be an older, dormant issue.

According to the MS doc 'Change the look and feel of Office', the UI change was supposed to happen sometime in summer 2021. You can also see the vertical positioning inconsistency of the elements in the title bar in the new UI's screenshots. The images are implying that all Office apps are supposed to look like this, but so far only Excel does, and only unintentionally.

Jun 26, 2021 (old appearance): https://web.archive.org/web/20210626074103/https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-look-and-feel-of-office-63e65e1c-08d4-4dea-820e-335f54672310#ID0EAACAAA=Windows
Jul 7, 2021 (new appearance): https://web.archive.org/web/20210707144828/https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-the-look-and-feel-of-office-63e65e1c-08d4-4dea-820e-335f54672310#ID0EAACAAA=Windows

theultramage
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3 Answers3

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I am observing exactly similar issue with Excel 2019. All in a sudden the theme and GUI of Excel changed into a strange one as described above. Contacted MS support but the only recommendation was to manually uninstall and re-install MSOffice (accepting the fact that all Office settings will be deleted, too). Not very helpful. Strange that only Excel is impacted and not the other Office applications. Maybe it is a result of the recent 21H2 upgrade or an issue with the MS account sync? Cheers, Fred

Fred
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No answer, but it changed all my office programs and deleted all my shortcuts. MSFT improving efficiency I guess

Getting Used To It
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  • As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please [edit] to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers [in the help center](/help/how-to-answer). – Community Nov 23 '21 at 15:05
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The cause appears to be HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\excel\Microsoft.Office.UXPlatform.FluentSVRefresh = 'true'
This setting, along with two more ribbon-related settings, causes Excel to change appearance to what is meant to be the 'new' Office look, and introduces all the abovementioned issues. It is not present after a clean install, so presumably it gets pushed onto users randomly via WU or some other channel. Adding this registry setting is enough to reproduce the issue. Changing it to 'false' is enough to fix it, at least for now.

Ref: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/633622/excel-toolbar-corrupted.html#answer-635812

theultramage
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