Dyslexic - use of color - Office 2007

[Whisperer14]

My Granddaughter is dyslexic and to assist her development she needs to work with a blue background. Regretably Microsoft appear to have removed the ability to change the background color of the appropriate 'Normal' template in Office 2007 such that all documents will open with a blue background.

Does any one know of a VBA work-around to modify the Normal template in WORD and EXCEL to meet her requirements.

To date I have produced alternative blue.dotx and blue.xltx which can be opened blue and then saved under a different name.

TIA GT

 

[Richard Schollar]

Hi

Have you tried placing the blue.xltx in the XLSTART folder and renaming it book.xltx? If you were using xl2003 that would definitely work for new workbooks in Excel (once the filename was suitably modified to xls of course). I am not sure if there is an equivalent for Word however.

 

[Whisperer14]

Thanks Richard,
That works for Excel (in part) but if I add a new blank worksheet to the open (blue) workbook then it reverts to white, any refinements possible?
Just going to try the Word solution
Gordon

 

[Whisperer14]

It does not work by saving 'Blue.dotx' in STARTUP as Normal.dotx, perhaps I am putting it in the wrong folder though...

 

[RoryA]

try saving an additional copy of book.xltx with one sheet as sheet.xltx in the XLSTART directory

 

[Richard Schollar]

Thanks Richard,
That works for Excel (in part) but if I add a new blank worksheet to the open (blue) workbook then it reverts to white, any refinements possible?
Just going to try the Word solution
Gordon

You just need a single sheet (with the blue background) saved down in the XLSTART folder as sheet.xltx - then new sheets added will use this format.

i suspect in the word START folder you would need to rename the template normal.dotx (so you are overwriting the exiting normal.dotx). However, I have no experience with using WORD (like this anyway), so be prepared to make a backup first!

 

[RoryA]

There used to be an option in Word to use blue background and white text - has that been removed? (I can't test until a bit later on)

 

[Richard Schollar]

There used to be an option in Word to use blue background and white text - has that been removed? (I can't test until a bit later on)

Rory

In my Word2002 that option exists in Tools>Options>General tab



EDIT: which means if it exists in Word 2007 it is probably somewhere under the office button (big ugly thing in top left). Good luck finding it...

 

[RoryA]

I just hijacked one of the IT guy's computer, and if the option is still there, it's very well hidden! The option to change the page background is now right on the ribbon though if all else fails.

 

[Whisperer14]

Thanks gentlemen for your responses. I have tried deleting the original normal.dotx file within the templates folder and saving my blue sheet as a word template but so far no luck. She has recently migrated from XP where the blue option did exist as a permanency but it appears to have been taken out of 2007.

OK the page background option is easily accessible but as she is the only user I had hoped to be able to offer an automatic opening of a blue sheet - I even used a macro to achieve it but I can not get it to run automatically when the sheet is first opened...

I guess I shall have to say beaten on that element. Again many thanks for your efforts on her behalf - anyone got Bill Gates email addy? I could get him out of retirement....

Gordon