hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can turn on dark mode in microsoft word wait hold up microsoft word has had dark mode for a while why am i making a video on this well in the past when you turn on dark mode it only changed the ribbon to dark but the actual document canvas itself was still white and when you think of dark mode that’s really only going about halfway there microsoft got a ton of feedback that it just wasn’t good enough so they went back and now when you turn on dark mode it changes the canvas to dark as well we’re going to take a look at how you can turn that on i’ll also jump into some of the nuances of the feature all right well why don’t we jump on the computer and let’s see how we can make things look darker here i am in microsoft word and i don’t know about you but this is extremely bright and especially when you’re sitting in front of a document for a very long time it really starts to strain your eyes let’s go ahead and turn on some dark mode it’s extremely easy to do go to the top left hand corner and click on the file menu within file let’s go down to the bottom left hand corner and click on account within the account view right about halfway down there’s an option called office theme and by default it’s set to the colorful theme this is the very bright experience that we saw on the previous page here you have a few different options like dark gray black and white if we want to take advantage of the new black theme or the dark mode let’s click on black right here and look at that it’s already changed the account screen to the new dark mode let’s jump back into the document to see what types of changes happened this drops us back onto the canvas and up above you can now see that dark mode is applied to the top ribbon but the new feature here is dark mode is also applied to the canvas so you now have dark mode everywhere and yes my eyes can finally relax a little bit now one of the really nice touches that i like about this dark mode if you look at the text here it’s a little bit more muted and a little less vibrant to what we saw when we had the colorful theme on and this makes it a little bit more visually pleasing when using dark mode when you turn on dark mode not only does it apply it to word but it also applies it to all of your other office applications so it’s really kind of like a universal setting here if i pull over microsoft powerpoint here you see that it’s turned on dark mode here as well and if i bring over microsoft excel you can see dark mode turned on here too except they kind of missed the memo here you’ll see that in both excel and in powerpoint the ribbon is in dark mode but hey what about the canvas why don’t they follow word’s lead i wouldn’t be surprised if in the near future we see yet another update to dark mode where it does the same type of treatment to the canvas with both excel and also powerpoint back now within microsoft word let’s say that maybe you preferred having the dark ribbon up on top but you liked having the white canvas in back or maybe you simply want to jump to the white canvas to check out what your text looks like when it’s going to be on a white background you can still very easily toggle back and forth between the dark background for the canvas and the light background up here on the top tabs let’s click on view and there’s now a new option right here for dark mode that says switch modes when we click on this this will toggle between the light canvas and here i can go back to the dark canvas and once again when i mentioned the muted colors here you can really see it look how vibrant these colors are right here and when i switch back into dark mode you can really see how they’re a little bit more muted so you can very easily toggle back and forth between these two different modes now when you have your document with the dark ribbon and the light background if that’s your preferred way of working well unfortunately here if i close word and let’s say i reopen the same document again inward you’ll notice that this one setting that we set over here where you can switch the modes it doesn’t persist so here we’re right back again to the dark background what if you want to use dark mode but you want to keep the canvas white all the time luckily there’s a setting that allows you to configure this let’s go up to the top left hand corner and click on the file menu and within file let’s go all the way down to the bottom left hand corner and click on options within options under the general view right down here there’s a new setting for office theme and here too you can also change your office theme so you can change it under both account and you could also change it under options when we have the black theme selected there’s now a check box that says disable dark mode when you check this box and click on ok that’ll change the canvas to white so when you re-open your word document again it’ll persist the white background i’m now back in dark mode and one question you might have is well if i turn on dark mode does that affect the document when i print it out and it doesn’t have any impact at all and just to test that out let’s go to the file menu and let’s go over to print and here i’ll print out this document to a pdf and let’s take a look to see what it looks like i just printed my document as a pdf let’s click into the file and let’s check it out and look at that it printed the file and all the colors look exactly as they should and it has a white background so once again by selecting the dark theme it won’t impact what your document looks like when you print it you now have all the knowledge you need to be able to turn on dark theme now let’s say you go through all the steps but you discover that you can’t actually turn it on yet it could be because microsoft is still rolling this feature out anytime microsoft completes a new feature they’ll roll it out to a small percentage of users first and then they’ll continue expanding it and exposing it to a larger percentage of users this allows microsoft to make sure that the feature is working as expected and to get feedback and so if they need to make any changes they have the opportunity to do that now if you don’t like waiting me for example i don’t like waiting for these new features i like seeing them as soon as possible you can opt into the office insider program and this will give you access to features first to opt-in to the office insider program let’s go to the top left hand corner and click on the file menu and just like we did at the very beginning of this video let’s go down and click on account within account over on the right hand side you’ll see an option for office insider if you’re not yet an office insider you can opt into the program once you’ve already opted into the program you can choose the channel that you want to be part of so what is a channel well let’s click on this and i’ll explain when we click on office insider you can choose your channel and when i click on this there are two different channels that you can sign up for there’s something called the current channel and there’s something else called the beta channel basically what microsoft does is first when they finish a feature they’ll expose it to the beta channel so basically you get to see the newest features first once it’s a little bit more baked and a little bit more stable they’ll move it up to the next channel which is the current channel so this is a larger audience more people get to use it more people get to give feedback and once it goes through the current channel then the next step is to make it available to the general public at that point when it goes out to the general public a whole bunch of people have already used it a lot of people have already given feedback and so it should be very stable at that point now with the dark mode this is currently only available to the beta channel so if you want to be able to start taking advantage of this today i’d recommend signing up to be an office insider and then opt into the beta channel now you might be wondering is it worth the risk of signing up for the beta channel it seems kind of risky doing that when i worked at microsoft we were on a channel that was even earlier than the beta channel and sure we ran into issues and we fixed issues but the important thing was to make sure that we fixed these issues before they became available to an even broader set of people by the time a feature makes it to the beta channel it’s already pretty baked and pretty stable so i think it’s relatively safe to move to this channel but once again if you’re running mission critical applications and say excel or maybe in word you might want to be a little bit more cautious alright well hopefully now your eyes are a little bit more relaxed if they are please give this video a thumbs up to see more videos like this in the future make sure to hit that subscribe button also if you want to see me cover any other topics on this channel leave a note down below alright well that’s all i had for you today i hope you enjoyed and as always i hope to see you next time bye [Music] you