Set Microsoft Office fonts and templates via GPO

Note that this process was originally written for Office 2010, but works with minor modifications for up to Office 2016, and Office 365. You must update the Office folders and registry keys to point to the appropriate versions, but all other settings were the same as of 12/1/2019.

I was asked if it was possible to re-brand our Office apps so that by default, we’d all be compliant with corporate branding when composing email, PowerPoint presentations, and Word documents. I looked at scripting it, but that seemed annoying to update for new/different versions of Office, so I dove into GPO editing. I couldn’t find anything relevant, so I downloaded the Office 2010 ADMX templates, and found nothing helpful there either.

Off to Google, and a few hundred other people seem to have the same problem, with no simple solution. So, after following about 20 different guides and pulling info from as many different places, I figured I’d try to consolidate so that others would have an easier time doing this.

Turns out that it’s a lot easier than I thought it would be. This requires that Office 2010 is already installed, otherwise registry changes will be overwritten. It will let you set the default font face, size and colour in Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, and define default theme colours for Word and PowerPoint.

First let’s do Outlook. Open Outlook, go to File > Options > Mail > Signatures and Stationery. Set your options, OK, OK. Now, that data was saved to the registry under, we're going to need this later:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Common\Mail\Settings

Then save that file as a Word template (.dot) file somewhere and close Word.

Open PowerPoint, set your new theme up from the Design tab as desired. Then save that file as a PowerPoint template (.pot) somewhere and close PowerPoint.

Copy those files all to a publicly accessible network share, all users that are going to have the customizations applied need to have read access to wherever you put them. The idea is to copy the two files to each user’s profile at first login, and make sure that the registry entries are already set.

Then, we just need to create the GPO to push those three items. Open up GP Management, create two new policies object in whatever OU you need it to be, then set a new file policy in User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings. Set the action toUpdate. The source files are the ones in the public share. You want to copy the files to:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Templates\FILENAME

On the common tab I have it set to run under the logged-on user’s security context, since we’re applying it to a user-profile based variable (%appdata%), we don’t want it running as the local system, which evaluates %appdata% to the Default or All Users profile directory.

Once you’ve set those up, you’ll also need to prevent Word from overwriting the template you just copied over at first run. You do this by creating a new Registry Item through a Registry GPO. Create a new Registry entry under User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Registry. Set the Action to Update, the Hive is HKCU, the Key Path is SoftwareMicrosoftOffice14.0WordOptions, the Value Type is aREG_DWORD, and the value is a Decimal 1. On the Common tab, set things so run in logged-on user’s security context, and that should be all for Word and Powerpoint.
MigrateNormalOnFirstBoot properties
To get Outlook set up, we need to create a new policy under User Configuration> Preferences> Windows Settings> Registry. Create a new Registry Wizard based policy. Since this also needs to evaluate things based on the user, you’ll need to have the Outlook registry key above in your local registry. HKCU only works when you’re locally logged in, so browsing another computer doesn’t work, and doing it by hand with new Registry items is annoying and inelegant.
This means you either need to add the key to your DC, or, ideally, be running RSAT and remotely configuring the GPO so you don’t have to, and since you shouldn’t have Office installed on your DC. Browse to:HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftOfficeOffice14.0CommonMailSettingsand select that key, and all subkeys. Click Finish, and that’s that.
The same steps will work with Windows Vista, 7, 8 and with Office 2007, as long as you update the paths as appropriate.