Hidden Longhorn Plex theme in MS Office 2003

[electron826]

While installing Microsoft Office 2003 on Windows Longhorn build 4015,
I noticed that the toolbar wasn't themed Cyan, as it is when the Luna theme is selected.
It was a really light blue, which I have never seen in Office 2003 before:



Office 2003 with XP's Luna theme enabled:



Office 2003 was released around the time when Longhorn builds containing the Plex theme were still being developed.
Could Microsoft have been anticipating that the next RTM build of windows would contain the Plex theme, and have added support for it, for forward-compatibility?

[Overdoze]

Not surprising actually. IIRC Office XP UI was also originally designed to work with Whistler's Watercolor theme.

[Melcher]

I'm not so sure whether or not this is something that's 'build in functionality' into Office or just a result of Office using the system's current color scheme. The latter does seem more plausible to me. There is no reason why Office should have adopted the Plex style as it was only used as a placeholder theme and never meant for public eyes - same holds for Watercolor.

[yourepicfailure]

Office 2003 was designed to take a theme color from the system and apply it to itself to match the current setting, and 'feel' right.
Run Office 2003 under Vista, and you get a similar color.
I have not tried this with the other themes available for Xp(embedded, black, noir themes) but I'd assume it would act the same with those.

[Windows OS]

Office 2003 was designed to take a theme color from the system and apply it to itself to match the current setting, and 'feel' right.
Run Office 2003 under Vista, and you get a similar color.
I have not tried this with the other themes available for Xp(embedded, black, noir themes) but I'd assume it would act the same with those.

Plus, I'm pretty sure that if you play around with the classic theme colors, Office should also follow suit...

[electron826]

Office 2003 was designed to take a theme color from the system and apply it to itself to match the current setting, and 'feel' right.
Run Office 2003 under Vista, and you get a similar color.
I have not tried this with the other themes available for Xp(embedded, black, noir themes) but I'd assume it would act the same with those.

Plus, I'm pretty sure that if you play around with the classic theme colors, Office should also follow suit...

You're correct, playing with the colours did change the theme!


Also, is the Office 2003 UI drawn by the processor at runtime, or is it stored as a series of bitmaps (like the rest of the Windows theme), which are then tweaked to match the system colour?

[Melcher]

For the largest part the UI consists of controls from the common control library (comctl32) part of the Win32 API. They are drawn by GDI. Some of the more Office specific UI probably are controls from libraries installed by Office itself.

[alexcbrookes]

Really wish they kept this theme... It was quite unique, and (in my opinion) better than what eventually became Aero...