Group Policy - setting window colour

[JJBandit]

Hi Folks,

 

i wonder if anyone can save me some time and help point me in the right direction.

 

I'm a bit new to setting up group policies, and have been set a project to assist dyspraxic, dyslexic and discalculate users by allowing certain users to have different background colours in their windows (word/excel etc.)

 

The users are all based on win10, so the advanced appearance settings are not available as they were in win7.

 

The resolution is:

 

I had a very similar problem. I wanted to change the background cell color in Excel to grey. What I did was edit the registry.1) Hit the windows key + R, opening the "run window"2) Type "regedit" to open the registry editor. This is dangerous and normally you should do it only if you are an advanced user and know what you are doing.3) Click "yes" when Windows asks you if want to allow the program to make changes.4) Open HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Control Panel > Colors. You should see a long list on the right, including "Windows" and probably the numbers 255 255 255. These are the RGB values for the color.5) Click Windows and type in any numbers you like. I chose 192 192 192 which gives a nice neutral grey.6) Restart your computer to allow the changes to take effect.When you restart, and open Word or Excel, you will get a grey background instead of a white background. When you print, it will still be white, but on screen it is grey. You can even use "white ink" in Excel for cells. You can read the cells on your screen but when the document prints they will be hidden.

 

This works fine when i set it locally on an admin user, however of course standard users have no access to regedit. So a group policy seems to be the answer.

 

However, i have set a users group with only the mandatory policies, which as far as i can tell have no relation to this regedit change. However something seems to be overruling the change. I'm guessing its going to be something to do with the computer group the laptop is in. But i can't for the life of me identify what policy that would be overpowering (for lack of a better word) the user policy.

 

I don;t suppose anyone who is a bit more familiar with group policies, could maybe point me in the right direction for where i should be looking? Or is there a way to make the user policy prioritize over the computer group policy for this specific user group?

 

 

I'm probably missing something really obvious, but as mentioned before, this is my first time trying to do something like this, and this is my project to learn.

 

So any advice or suggestions are welcomed.

 

Many thanks in advance.!

[ZeroHour]

You can set registry keys using Group Policy Preferences although it would need to be to the OU of the computer and would affect all users I suspect.

It may be worth having a play with Windows 10 Easy of Access settings and see if you can at least recreate the effect there.

[smarties11]

You can set registry keys using Group Policy Preferences although it would need to be to the OU of the computer and would affect all users I suspect.

It may be worth having a play with Windows 10 Easy of Access settings and see if you can at least recreate the effect there.

 

You can use a User GPP to set registry keys in HKLM, you just need to have a reverse GPP applied too, using item targeting.

 

e.g. one user GPP that sets an HKLM registry value, with item targeting set to target a group that the users you want to apply the key to are members of

and a second user GPP that unsets the HKLM registry value, with item targeting set to target the same group but with the condition 'not a member of' set.

 

Hope this helps!

[Rob_D]

Based on what you're asking for:

project to assist dyspraxic, dyslexic and discalculate users by allowing certain users to have different background colours in their windows (word/excel etc.)

It might be worth looking at a "screen tint" program like Colorviel or Screen Tinter. We've put Colorviel on our computers and it seems to work fine.

It might be easier than faffing with GPOs or registry keys and probably more flexible.

[smarties11]

Based on what you're asking for:

 

It might be worth looking at a "screen tint" program like Colorviel or Screen Tinter. We've put Colorviel on our computers and it seems to work fine.

It might be easier than faffing with GPOs or registry keys and probably more flexible.

 

+1 for ColorVeil, we use it here too.

[JJBandit]

Hi Folks,

 

Thanks for all the advice. It turns out i made the schoolboy error or using 255.255.0 in the registry, and needed to use 255 255 0 instead. So it seems to have worked perfectly

[timbo343]

I'm currently testing ColorVeil and was wondering if there are any registry entries that can be applied centrally via Group Policy to globally enable / disable some of the options.

 

I see that the settings are in the Roaming side of the profiles under ..\AppData\Roaming\East-Tec\ColorVeil\ColorVeil.settings.

 

I guess the only way to get this to work would be to import the .settings file when a user logs into the computer.