Monthly Archives: August 2007

Office 2007 title bars

I’ve ranted before about applications which decide to implement their own standards for colours. iTunes is the classic example. In order to make it look all cool and hip and skivvy-wearing-Apple-like, it has subtle shades of grey on the title bar to indicate (ha!) whether it’s active or inactive.

So I’ve been playing around with Office 2007, and now I find they’ve done the same damn thing.

Here is Word 2007 when it’s active.

Word 2007

And here it is when it’s inactive.

Word 2007

Actually, no, wait, I might have got those mixed up. Which is precisely my point.

WinXP’s default colour scheme gives me nice bold title bars, which clearly prompt me as to what’s got focus, and what hasn’t. Office 2007 overrides this, ignoring any preferences I might have set in Windows.

Digging around the Office 2007 help, and sure enough there is a way to change it. Well, almost. Well, not quite. Actually no, there isn’t. All they give you is the option of three different colour schemes: Blue (default, pictured above), silver (which is so close to blue it might as well be the same) and black.

Black, as it happens, gives the most contrast between active and inactive title bars. But it’s not only ugly, it also totally grates against every other window under the XP colour scheme. Do I have to change my XP colour scheme to be equally ugly just so I don’t have clashing window colours? The only benefit is it appears to almost match Media Player 11.

I know MS wanted to break the mould with Office 2007, to radically change the user interface. And I kinda like the big goofy buttons. But this bloody title bar thing is very, VERY irritating.