New Office 365 Themes Available

Including a Nice Bricks Theme

We all need a little levity in our lives right now…

In June 2019, I reported the introduction of three new themes (Ribbon, Rainbow, and Unicorn) to brighten the lives of Office 365 users. Microsoft has gradually built out the set of available themes to 49 at today’s count. I must admit that this fact utterly escaped my attention until I noticed a Microsoft presenter using a nice Lego(tm) -like theme called “Bricks” (Figure 1). And because the world has been a crazy place recently, I decided that this topic needed some attention.

The bricks theme applied to the Office 365 home page
Figure 1: The bricks theme applied to the Office 365 home page

Choosing Your Theme

Some of the themes are simple colors like Black, Watermelon, and Dark Orange. Others appeal to the more artistic side of users and include:

  • Balloons.
  • Beach sunset.
  • Cats.
  • Circuit.
  • Comic book.
  • Crayon.
  • Cubanism.
  • Far, far, away.
  • Jelly fish.
  • Mountain peak.
  • Primary.
  • Robot.
  • Strawberry.
  • Super Sparkle Happy.

I’m not sure that I could cope with looking at the Super Sparkle Happy theme on a daily basis, but no doubt some will like it. Figure 2 shows how to select a theme from Office 365 settings. In this instance, it’s Super Sparkle Happy!

electing the Super Sparkle Happy Office 365 theme
Figure 2: Selecting the Super Sparkle Happy Office 365 theme

Theme Used Across Office 365 Online Apps

You can occupy a couple of minutes browsing the available themes and deciding which one satisfies your aesthetic viewpoint. Once selected, the theme should be picked up by all the Office online apps like OWA, SharePoint, OneDrive, Stream, Yammer, Planner, and the Microsoft 365 admin center. The Teams browser client will ignore your choice on the basis that such an important app can’t be concerned with such trivial detail, but the Teams admin center is happy to comply.

Teams admin center displays the bricks theme
Figure 3: Teams admin center displays the bricks theme

Spreading happiness is part of what we do at the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. A little laughter goes a long way when the world seems to be crazier by the day.

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