Office 2007 – Death of Blue Screen

It was brought it to my attention that Office 2007 killed the white text on blue background feature.  I was incredulous – how could the folks at Microsoft be so myopic?  This feature is an absolute necessity for long bouts of staring at a computer screen.  But sure enough, Microsoft confirms it:

Blue background with white text option: This feature, included in earlier versions of Word to emulate legacy versions of WordPerfect, is no longer used.

According to rationale I saw discussed on forums the feature was killed because it affected such a small fraction of users.  I too found that to be the case in college – few had heard about it.  But those that started using it found it immensely more comfortable to use for those late-night research papers and essays.

If you have an older version of Word and want to see what the feature is, follow these directions .

This is not quite a viable alternative for people who must use Office, but WriteRoom and its Windows clone DarkRoom let you change the background/foreground colors to anything you want. They’re also the antithesis of Word with, a bare minimum of features.  Apparently their bare minimum of features now includes things that Word does not.