MicrosoftMy experience with this Visual Refresh with the dark grey theme has been very frustrating. I have a new Surface Pro 8 running Windows 11 that I tried to connect to an external monitor, but the grey color in office apps (e.g. Outlook) was far too dark (appeared almost black on an external monitor) and the unusually high contrast made it almost unusable. This seemed very strange to me, because I was previously using a laptop running Windows 10 with the dark grey theme, on which I love the subtle different shades of grey--apparently that laptop did not have the visual refresh enabled (which I did not realize until a few minutes ago). I also noticed the office background is not visible on the SP8/Win11 with the Visual Refresh enabled. I tried to change the office background (I normally use Circuit), but regardless of which one I chose, it was not visible with the Visual Refresh enabled. Since I did not even know about the Visual Refresh, I thought something was seriously wrong with my Surface Pro 8 or Windows 11 settings, since everything looked so dark and high contrast in Office apps. I thought somehow I had a high contrast mode enabled, but that was not the case. I kept looking through the different settings in Windows 11 and in Office, such as personalization, color, office theme, office background, etc. and was having no luck, but I could see that clearly things looked very different on these two computers. It took me about 45 minutes to find out that this issue was caused by this "Visual Refresh." In conclusion, I think that 1) this visual refresh is terrible with the dark grey theme, and 2) the visual refresh seems incompatible with office backgrounds (they are invisible when the visual refresh is on), and 3) most users will not know that this visual refresh has occurred, and may therefore think something is wrong with their system. I strongly recommend making this a choice that is in the office settings rather than in the "Coming Soon" and to ask the user if they want to try it.
