Reducing Eye Strain During Data Analysis
Staring at a massive, bright white spreadsheet filled with thousands of rows of data for hours on end is a guaranteed recipe for eye fatigue and headaches. If you spend your workday deep in financial models or data sets, switching your workspace to a darker colour palette can significantly improve your comfort.
Microsoft Excel offers a built-in Dark Mode that flips the blinding white menus, toolbars, and ribbons into soothing shades of dark grey and black. However, applying this theme requires understanding how Microsoft Office handles settings across its entire ecosystem, as the switch is not located where most people expect it to be.
Because Excel is part of the broader Microsoft 365 suite, changing the theme in Excel will automatically apply that same dark theme to Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook on that computer.
How to Enable the Dark Grey or Black Theme
To turn on Dark Mode, you do not use the “View” or “Page Layout” tabs on the main ribbon. Instead, you must access the master account settings.
- Open Microsoft Excel. If it opens to a blank workbook, click on File in the extreme top left corner to enter the backstage view. If it opens to the home screen showing your recent files, proceed to the next step.
- Look at the very bottom of the green left-hand sidebar. Click on Account (if you do not see Account, click on Options, then go to the General tab).
- On the right side of the screen, look for the section titled Office Theme.
- Click the dropdown menu next to Office Theme. You will see several options:
- Colourful: The default setting (green header, white background).
- Dark Grey: A softer dark mode with high contrast, excellent for most users.
- Black: True dark mode, which makes the toolbars completely black.
- Use system setting: This tells Excel to automatically switch between light and dark mode based on your master Windows or macOS system settings.
- Select either Dark Grey or Black.
The interface will instantly update. You do not need to restart the application. The entire ribbon, the formula bar, and the side panels will now be dark.
Why Is the Spreadsheet Grid Still White?
When you enable the Dark Grey or Black theme, you will immediately notice something jarring: while all the menus and buttons turn black, the actual spreadsheet grid itself—the cells where you type your data—remains glaringly white.
This is intentional. Microsoft defaults to keeping the page white so that any custom cell colours, conditional formatting, or coloured text you have previously applied remain accurate and legible when you print the document or share it with a colleague who uses a light theme.
However, if you are using the Black theme (this does not work with the Dark Grey theme) on a modern Microsoft 365 subscription, you can force the actual grid to turn dark as well.
- Ensure you have selected the Black theme in the Account settings.
- Open a workbook and look at the main ribbon at the top of the screen.
- Click on the View tab.
- Look for a button with a sun/moon icon labelled Switch Background.
- Click it. The bright white grid will instantly invert to a dark grey canvas, with white gridlines and white text.
Clicking the button again will toggle the grid back to white. Importantly, this only changes how the spreadsheet looks on your specific monitor. If you print the document, or email the file to a client, they will still see a standard white spreadsheet.
How to Enable Dark Mode in Excel on the Web
If you are using the free, browser-based version of Excel instead of the installed desktop application, the process is slightly different.
- Open your web browser and log into Excel for the Web.
- Open a workbook.
- Look at the main ribbon and click on the View tab.
- Click the Dark Mode button located on the right side of the ribbon.
Just like the desktop version, this will turn the menus dark while leaving the spreadsheet canvas white, requiring less visual strain while maintaining document fidelity.
