For Mac users who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a full-screen, distraction-free writing environment. Unlike the cluttered word processors you’re used to, WriteRoom is just about you and your text.

Lifehacker likes it, Factory Joe talks about it, and 43 folders… well acknowledges it. I can’t find many people who hate it and I myself think that the idea of distraction free writing is a great one.

There has been cloned versions made; DarkRoom for Windows with the .NET framework and JDarkRoom for computers running Java.

I’m not really interested in installing more software on my computer so i decided to see what i could do by tweaking Word 2007. I could have used UltraEdit or possibly even OneNote 2007 but I thought that Word would be the easiest because I could create a template instead of changing my preferences.

This is what I came up with.

Continue reading for instructions how how to set it up. Obviously you’ll need Word 2007 to do this.

Faking (sorta) WriteRoom in Word 2007

The first thing I did was to make my default Office 2007 interface Black, well really shades of grey. To do this you go into the word preferences you those under the Customize Quick Access Toolbar > More Commands

Once the options dialog opens up choose Popular on the left and find the Color Scheme option. Change the color scheme to Black. This is the one setting that will effect all your office programs so when I said I didn’t want to change any preferences i guess i kinda lied. Luckily I have my Office set to Black all the time because I like it that way.

Next under the View Tab i set the document view to Web Layout.

Then under the Page Layout tab I set the Page Color to a very dark grey almost a black.

Then I removed a bunch of the default styles of the document and modified the remaining ones to be a good contrast on the dark grey background. So I changed Normal text from black to white.

Then I wanted to hide the office ribbon so I double-clicked on a tab. So when I am working with my text I can right-click and get all the formatting options I really need including document styles.

So I think that this will work out for me when i try to start writing, God knows I need the help. I have a DOTX template that may help you skip some of these steps that you can download. I hope this can help some people.