Yes, after the latest update MS Office is now also capable of supporting the OSX Dark Mode. Nice, but rather annoying for MS Outlook I must say, the dark mode just makes reading the different panes very challenging. I went looking for an option in the UI that allowed me to change the default, I couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but I did find a way to disable it through the command line. For MS Outlook, in particular, this is how you do it:
defaults write com.microsoft.Outlook NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool yes
You can do this for other apps as well if you want, simply change the identifier string of Outlook (com.microsoft.Outlook) with the string of the app you want to disable it for. If you don’t know the string you can do the following to find it:
osascript -e 'id of app "Outlook"'
In the above example, I am looking for the identifier of Outlook, but this could be “Spotify” or anything else as well of course. Figured I would share this, as I found myself searching for half an hour. Note that you need to close/open the app after making the change!
Mark says
17 December, 2018 at 15:00Great timing! I love the dark mode, but I rather had Outlook still the old-fashioned way. I had this on my “to do list” since the forced introduction of the Outlook dark mode. Thank for sharing and caring!
William says
17 December, 2018 at 17:22Amazing, thank you!
Richie says
17 December, 2018 at 20:42Exactly what I was looking for! Thanks so much!
Gianni Resti says
18 December, 2018 at 10:36Brilliant! It was a really mess to use office in dark mode!
Prajnesh Eric says
30 January, 2019 at 08:12Awesome!!! Brilliant .. It worked like gem. Small Suggestion even after executing the command in the terminal if the outlook didn’t change to Dark mode is still didn’t turn off, please quit the Outlook application and reopen the application again. Boom !!! It works…
Thanks Epping
Duncan Epping says
6 February, 2019 at 10:14thanks for adding that, app needs to be closed and opened indeed.
Patrik says
20 February, 2019 at 01:24very helpful, thank you very much:)
Sergey says
5 March, 2019 at 13:09Thank you very much!
luc says
28 March, 2019 at 17:06there is a checkbox in the Outlook Mac’s Preference->General to turn off dark mode. I don’t know when it showed up.