Word background colour ignores Windows setting

[wiganken]

I use Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 on my Windows 8.1 64-bit OS. Because I find stark-white too bright to stare at for long I changed the “Window” colour to RGB value 140 160 140 (a pale-green) using the Windows registry Editor. I do not mean that I want the ‘paper’ to actually be green and print in green; I only want it to look green so it is easy to look at. When I launch Excel the spreadsheet is displayed in the pale green colour I specified but if I launch Word the ‘paper’ colour displayed is stark-white, not the expected pale green as in Excel. Interestingly if I right-click in a folder or on the desktop and select “New/Microsoft Word Document” and give it a name this creates the new document ready for opening. If I then double-click on the new document to open it for editing the ‘paper’ colour displayed is the pale-green colour I specified. In my previous version of Word (2010) the ‘paper’ colour obeyed the Windows Registry setting and I did not have this issue. Also all existing Word documents display as white thereby ignoring Windows Registry setting.

Problem seems to be connected with the normal.dotm Word template file: -

It seems that the filename ‘normal’ and the macro-enabled extension ‘dotm’ when used together cause the issue. If I double-click on the following template files ->

normal.dotm launches Word and shows ‘paper’ colour white.
normal.dotx launches Word and shows ‘paper’ colour green.

Saving the normal.dotm template ‘as’ normal.dotx creates two templates. If I then delete normal.dotm template leaving only the normal.dotx template Word still launches with a white background and also re-creates normal.dotm. The normal.dotx template is ignored.

Questions: -



1. Has anyone any ideas how to get the Word normal.dotm template to display the “Window” colour defined in the Windows Registry?

2. Since I do not use macros how do I get Word to permanently use normal.dotx template instead of normal.dotm template? This may fix the issue for all existing and new Word documents.