The new Office 365 icons are horrible, but you are probably stuck with them
For nearly all new Microsoft software updates Wise Owl are prepared to wait before commenting, but the new Office 365 icons are much harder to read and distinguish than the old ones!

Posted by Andy Brown on 05 August 2019

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Changing back from the new Office 365 icons

What were Microsoft thinking?  Depending on your update channel, you will have been getting used to the new Office icons for a greater or lesser period of time:

Excel icons

Some of the new icons in Excel - note the Save icon shown selected in the Quick Access toolbar.

 

Because we're on the semi-annual update channel, I only saw the new icons for the first time this week.

Here are some of the new Outlook icons:

Outlook icons

Some of the new Outlook icons - less colours, more geometrical lines.

 

The reason for the change (apparently) is that the old icons didn't scale up or down to different screen sizes well, whereas the new set are fully responsive.

Changing back to the old icons

So how do you get the old icons back?  The short answer is that you can't, without reverting to an older version of Office (and there's not much point doing this, because an automatic update will inevitably eventually overwrite your change).

But you CAN whinge about it!  Try this forum:

Ribbon icons

I couldn't have put it better myself!

Or see the rather more nuanced discussion here (although someone does talk about the new--for-toddler icons).  Maybe if enough people complain Microsoft will have a change of heart.  I should add that I don't normally complain about new features, because I know it takes a while to get used to change, but I don't think anything will ever convince me that this is an improvement:

Old Save New Save
The old Save icon The new Save icon

There - I feel better now! 

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