Microsoft's new Office UI is now available to everyone

Microsoft is starting to roll out its new Office UI to all users this week. The visual update was originally announced earlier this year and went into testing over the summer. Now it has started rolling out to all Office 365 and Office 2021 users.

This new Office UI is designed to match the visual changes in Windows 11, and includes a more rounded look to the Office ribbon bar, along with some subtle changes to buttons in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. It's a relatively simple refresh, and Office will now match the dark or light theme you set up inside Windows.

The new look can be turned on or off using the Coming Soon megaphone icon in the upper right corner of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote. It should be available to all Windows 11 users right now, and Microsoft says that 50 percent of existing Channel customers will have Visual Update automatically enabled.

Most of the design changes are subtle, but Microsoft has made more dramatic changes to its Office UI, including moving toward a more command bar instead of the traditional ribbon interface. We're still expecting to see these in the web and mobile versions of Office first, and Microsoft said last year that it could take a year or two to roll out its major Office UI changes.