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Deleted's avatar
Deleted
Mar 11, 2017

Unable to Change the look and feel for Office 365 groups site, stuck on the status "working on it"

Faced the issue on two different tenants, unable to change the look and feel of office 365 groups sites, by navigating to Site Contents>Site settings >Change the look,no matter what look i select i just get a working on it message, tried different browsers/machines, works on one tenant but not on two others not sure what to look for, Please Advise.

  • Tabatha Simpson's avatar
    Tabatha Simpson
    Copper Contributor

    Same here - last year I was able to change the look with no problem.  But now I created a new subsite and it hangs on "Working On It" when I click "Try It Out".  Using the same color theme as in the other sites I'd created.

    I did not have any additional languages checked in either the new subsite or the parent site.

    I tried logging out and deleting all my temp internet files, cookies, etc., but that did not fix it.

    I am working remotely, so I have tried it both connected to the VPN and not connected.

    I'm using Windows 10, Internet Explorer 11.

     

    • Paige Holland's avatar
      Paige Holland
      Copper Contributor

      Super disappointing to see posts on this from over six months ago.  How do issues like this get resolved?

      • Steve McHargue's avatar
        Steve McHargue
        Copper Contributor

        Paige Holland  - they don't - you just spin your wheels waiting to retire and wondering why you spent the last 20 years thinking sharepoint would ever become something people would want to use. 

  • Nada Admin's avatar
    Nada Admin
    Copper Contributor

    I am in the same boat with Sharepoint in O365.

     

    Created a site "Extranets" to hold all the extranets the client wished to create.

    Created 5 subsites to be those extranets.

     

    Can change the look and feel, style, template or however you want to refer to it at the "Extranets" level - however when I try and change it on any of the subsites Sharepoint hangs on :

    Argh - can anyone please help? We will be creating up to 20 of these and I need inheritance of permissions etc that I can only get setting them up this way.

     

    Do Microsoft not come into this thread themselves?

     

    Thanks in advance!

    • Jesse Belcastro's avatar
      Jesse Belcastro
      Copper Contributor

      Same issue.  Specifically, added a subsite Team Blog and unable to update the look either standard default themes or custom.

      • Haseeb Mukhtar's avatar
        Haseeb Mukhtar
        Copper Contributor

        I have solved the issue by removing additional languages on the parent site and on the sub site.

  • SuperAJ's avatar
    SuperAJ
    Copper Contributor

    We are also having this issue.  Tried many different browsers and systems...anyone found a solution?

  • Wyatt Jones's avatar
    Wyatt Jones
    Copper Contributor

    I too am having this issue. It will be working on it all day long. I am surprised nobody has found a resolution to this yet.

  • I too have the same issue for "modern" team sites. It just sits there spinning on "Working on it..." for a very long time. What's strange is I was able to "change the look" about a month or two back. It was slow and it didn't feel quite right, taking perhaps 1-2 mins to "try" before allowing me to apply, but it worked.

     

    My reading suggests the PnP Provisioning Engine may be needed to change themes for modern team sites:

    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/modern-experience-customizations-customize-sites

     

    The provided powershell script didn't work for me either, I get the error "the operation has timed out". This too is a known issue, with one of the contributors of the former pnp article above commenting:

    "This is unfortunately known issue around theme apply process with modern sites"

     

    Reference: https://github.com/SharePoint/PnP/issues/1622

     

    • Deleted's avatar
      Deleted

      It appears to be an issue with multiple language selections for the tenant, i had to tweak with language/ regional settings for the tenant/ site ; appears to work for some sites; though still not stable.

      • Silvain Mak's avatar
        Silvain Mak
        Copper Contributor

        I'm having the same issue.

        For subsites under my Group site the Change the look --> Try it out is stuck on "Working on it".

         

        I've tried the alternate language hack (nothing was checked here anyhow).

        Nothing seems to work.

        I can change the look on my Group Site, but not under newly created subsites. Any ideas?

         

        What would my next step be?

  • Hi,

     

    It seems we're having a similar issue.

    Did you get any update on this, or found some workaround you can share?

     

    Thanks!

    JC

  • Changing theme in SPO site is in general is a heavy operation, but it should end with the expected result no matter if you are talking about a Group site or any other SPO Site...but I have just verified that when applying a theme in a Group site I'm also stuck on the "Working on it message" but I finally got the theme applied. I tried to change the them from a Group site where I first created the Group from OWA and also from a modern team site I created from the SPO landing page....and in this case I got an error after trying to apply the theme...so it seems something is wrong here cfiessinger

    • Deleted's avatar
      Deleted
      Thank you for your response Juan, Could this possibly be a bug or is it something which hasn't been launched completely for office 365 groups?
      Couldn't find much on the same in the roadmap, it does mention that office 365 groups include a full powered SharePoint team site, so shall we expect all the features of a general team site to work in Office 365 group sites as well ? I am able to change the theme fine for a general SharePoint Team site. Any info would be greatly appreciated !

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