Here's what I did to get the dark-gray background:
1. Selected the Black theme in Options
2. Opened the normal.dot using a line of VBA in the immediate window.
3. Made changes to the styles as desired. I selected Grayscale in style color, then made some other changes in styles, such as font size & color, hyperlink color, etc.
4. Changed page background color in Page Layout > Page Background > Page Color
5. Saved the normal.dot file open in the VBA editor, and saved again when closing Word.
So, the black background is what I selected using the Black theme, but for some reason, creating a new document from backstage or Ctrl + N is ignoring the page color I selected for normal.dot, reverting to the black which is default for the theme.
But I still get the changes I made to styles when I create a document, regardless of which method I use.
Note: The box 'Show background colors and images in Print Layout view is ticked for all documents.
I do have a VBA procedure in Normal/Modules/NewMacros.
This is the code in the procedure:
Code:
Sub AutoNew()
With ActiveDocument
With .Background.Fill
.ForeColor.ObjectThemeColor = wdThemeColorText1
.ForeColor.TintAndShade = 0#
.Visible = msoTrue
.Solid
End With
.ActiveWindow.View.DisplayBackgrounds = True
End With
End Sub