Why does office 2007 look like this?

For some reason the interface is black and white. Its doesn't effect its usability but its really annoying.

 

Do you have any funky things checked under Compatibility?

 

Do you have disabled visual theme and run in 256 mode options enabled?

 

Nope everything is unchecked, I have tried running as an administrator, and in compatibility mode with no luck.

 

Reinstall it?

 

Like posted earlier I only get that when running.256 color mode too.....

 

I tried reinstalling it with no luck...

 

Doesn't Office go into a reduced functionality 'ugly' mode when it's not licensed or activated properly?

Also, are you running this native/local to your machine and not via some kind of remote session like VMware VDI or Citrix?

 

Just to check, you have just looked into the word options, and checking whether it's on the default blue, black, or silver colour schemes, right?

 

I thought something like that might be going on so installed it on my girlfriends computer and it looks fine. So my registration is good.

Also I have checked the word options and changing the color scheme has no effect on it.

 

I've heard about this problem off and on with Office 2007, and I thought I remembered a fix for it. I didn't, but when I went googling, I did find, buried in the hits, several emails that point to a possible driver conflict. Here's the text of one of the discussions I found (the fix is in point #3 - the conflict with the SMS driver):

I have seen one or two other discussions where this was the fix for the Office 2007 256-colors-only issue, which is what you've got.

Give that solution a try and see if it doesn't fix things.

 

I actually stumbled upon that same thing before but I couldn't find the SMS remote control agent in my device manager. Any idea where its located?

 

Ok, I have a lead to follow to see if you've got the "mirrored" sms driver installed. According to an old knowledgebase article I just found,

So I would look under the display adapters section in the device manager to see what you can find there.

EDIT: Just thinking about it, if it is some problem with conflicting display drivers, it might even be worthwhile to uninstall/reinstall your video drivers, even if you can't find an sms mirrored driver, just to see if that will shake anything out of the tree.

 

So no SMS driver and I reinstalled the default driver from the dell site and still no luck.

 

When you said you re-installed Office, did you uninstalled Office 2007 before or just re-installed over.

If you re-installed over, I recommend to uninstall, use CCleaner (Free) and clean out the registry (for left over settings), restart your computer, and install Office 2007 again.

Also, did you install any tweak interface/theme programs? I know some people use some tool to use custom non-digital signed Windows themes using Windows built-in theme system and that usually breaks everything. The best solution is to use replacement programs like WindowsBlind instead.

 

Thanks I'll try that today.

 

Oh something else to do, Open AppData folder ( Start > type: sell:appdata > ENTER), and make sure you don't have any Office 2007 folders inside. Look also under Microsoft.
If you use outlook, you may want to backup the e-mail account, else they may all disappear if you configured it to POP.

Note: "sell:appdata" opens C:\Users\<Account Name>\AppData\Roaming, once you seek&delete inside for Office files, go back up one folder to AppData, and go in Local folder and look in there as well.

 

I'm out of ideas, except for one - there is a little utility someone dreamed up that is supposed to help in making sure that every part of Office 2007 is uninstalled from a system. It's called, cleverly enough, Remove Office 2007. You might try uninstalling Office 2007 the usual way, then running Remove Office 2007, and the re-installing Office 2007 to see if that clears out the affected junk that's causing this.

 

you can do it the hard way ............. reinstall windows

 

Go grab the Office 2010 Beta. Many tweaks that greatly improve on 2007, and you can just leave your problem in the dust.

 

I think im just going to use open office. I am tired of trying to get this to work. Thanks for all the suggestions anyway.

 

Just one last question:

Is it a privately owned PC or a work PC?

Is there any chance someone/ you remotely connected to the PC?

At work I have had multiple cases of MS Office 2003 looking like this after someone remoted into a PC. The solution was to remote into that PC again and Office reverted back to its normal, civilized look.

 

No, this is a personal PC no one has access to it other than me. So I don't think that happened. Thanks for the thought though.

 

Have you tried installing it then creating another user account to see if it's just isolated to your account? Other than that, I have no idea past what others have suggested. Odd problem you have there, and very irritating I'm sure!