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Modern Themes missing in new Outlook

Anonymous
2024-11-07T14:31:04+00:00

Dear Microsoft Community,

I hope you are doing well!

I would like to ask you for your advice with the New Outlook themes missing for me. I will try to keep this short, so basically I have a work Office 365 Account Enterprise from my work. We are using Office 365 apps to work and I was using the classic Outlook for almost 2 years but due to the fact that it is outdated in many ways, lacks a lot of functionalities of the new Outlook and most importantly have often issues with sync as new emails are not coming and then suddenly they appear in bulk. The new Outlook works flawlessly, has modern look and also when I am using the Scheduling assistance it shows me the time of each participant for the selected slot in their own time zone and that is why I prefer to use it. However, the only thing that I don't like is that when I go to the settings to change the Theme I have only 2 options:

While at the same time, Microsoft is offering a wide variety of Themes for the new Outlook in both colors and Modern beautiful images:

So I really don't understand why I am limited to only 2 options. I remember that in my previous job, it was the same, so I was thinking that it is some sort of company limitation. I filed an IT ticket and I was just told our official mail is the Classic Outlook use that. While that was not my question. My question is why we have this limitation as it doesn't make sense. I filed a new ticket a few days ago asking if our IT team can check with the responsible person/team for why there is this limitation and so far there is no progress on this. But what surprised me is that a few days after I filed the new ticket, suddenly I had the options for all of these themes in Web Outlook. When I selected a beautiful mountain it also reflected on the desktop app of the new Outlook as well (despite not having the options there for some reason).

And now, a few days later the options of the new Themes have disappeared both on the Web and on the desktop app of the new Outlook. I have the last theme that I selected before the options has disappeared - a green set and now I have it as a theme but when I go to the settings I once again have only the grey and blue options:

So my question is - does anyone here have a suggestion and knows what is happening and why I don't have the Themes available, why they showed up for a few days and disappeared again? I have tried uninstalling and installing new Outlook app, tried new Outlook PWA app as well.

Thank you!

Outlook | Windows | New Outlook for Windows | For home

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  1. Anonymous
    2024-12-16T05:31:09+00:00

    Hi Nikolay,

    We had the same issue and I just got to the bottom of it. In our case this was related to a setting in MS 365 admin centre. If you go to Settings -> Org Settings -> Organization Profile -> Custom themes -> Default them you might find that the option 'Prevent users from overriding their theme' is ticked. This is mainly done to stop users from changing the SharePoint theme but also prevents users from changing the theme in the new Outlook.

    Here is the link to the support page as well - Customize the theme for your organization - Microsoft 365 admin | Microsoft Learn

    Image

    I hope this helps!

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  2. Anonymous
    2024-11-07T19:20:22+00:00

    Many organizations use Microsoft 365 admin settings to restrict customization options like themes in Outlook for reasons related to loading speed, security, or branding purposes. In some cases, theme availability is limited by an organization’s admin settings, which may explain why you briefly saw additional themes enabled before they reverted. This could indicate an admin policy refresh or a temporary lapse in those restrictions.

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  3. Anonymous
    2024-12-17T08:33:05+00:00

    Hello @Oliver Mergen!

    Thank you for the information! I was certain that there is an admin setting that is preventing the wider variety of options.

    The thing is however, I am not the admin so I cannot change that.

    Let's hope that one day we may have more options.

    Cheers and Happy Holidays!

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  4. Anonymous
    2024-11-14T09:35:47+00:00

    Hello Nicolas,

    Thank you for your reply! I agree with you that as just as I thought there is some sort of company policy. Although, when I submit an IT ticket to ask why that is, I received a response that our Company is not blocking any themes and they advised me to use Classic Outlook. Go figure 😆

    By the way, in the official Office 365 roadmap we can see this:

    So I assume probably there is some enrollment ongoing.

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