Using Office theme colors in your add-in

This post is over a year old, some of this information may be out of date.

Will I was doing some preparation for a new talk about how you can make use of the Office UI Fabric in your applications/add-ins. I found a session from Connect() from Humberto Lezama Guadarrama which shows you what UI Fabric is and how to use it (Office UI Fabric - Connect()). There is something very interesting at around minute 3:50, Humberto shows you how the add-in can switch its colors based on the Office client theme which is set by the user.

Note: the sample application can be found here - Office Add-in Fabric UI Sample.

Unfortunately, the code for changing the add-in colors based on the Office theme is not available in the sample. So I did some research and created a sample application which visualizes the Office client theme colors.

Retrieving the Office theme

Retrieving the Office theme is even easier than I expected. Since the 1.1 version of the Office.js JavaScript API there is an officeTheme property available. The officeTheme property contains four HEX color values which can be used in the add-in.

bodyBackgroundColor
bodyForegroundColor
controlBackgroundColor
controlForegroundColor

Note: more information about this property can be found here - Context.officeTheme property.

Important: retrieving the Office theme colors is only available for Office 2016 and requires version 1.1 of the Office.js JavaScript API.

The values can be retrieved like this:

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Office.context.officeTheme.bodyBackgroundColor

Using the colors in your add-in

The way to use these colors in you add-ins is by applying it via JavaScript. Here is an example:

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$('.example').css({
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  'background-color': Office.context.officeTheme.bodyBackgroundColor,
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  'color': Office.context.officeTheme.bodyForegroundColor
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});