Control the color of individual start menu tiles

In Windows 10, the start menu tiles all have the same background color, determined by the color theme you choose.

However, the Microsoft Office tiles (e.g. Excel, Word) each have different colors - Word is blue, Excel is green, etc.

Is there any way to set individual colors on other tiles? E.g. could I set Visual Studio to be purple and Evernote to be green?

To be clear, I don't want to control the overall theme - e.g. I don't want all tiles to be green instead of grey - I want to control the tile colors individually.


There is help on changing tiles that are shortcuts to exe files here:

[Tip] Customize Start Screen Tiles Background Color, Text Color and Logo in Windows 8.1 and Later

and there are some utilities that do it for you. Here's one:

Windows Tile Color Changer

It would be nice if this was built in.


For Desktop Apps:

  1. Locate the .exe for the tile
    a. Right click the tile icon, and select "Open File Location"
    b. Then right click the shortcut icon, and select "Open File Location" again
  2. Create a new file named EXE_Name.VisualElementsManifest.xml and add the following contents:

    <Application xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
        <VisualElements BackgroundColor="#666666"
                        ShowNameOnSquare150x150Logo="on"
                        ForegroundText="light"/>
    </Application>
  3. Rename the shortcut to refresh the image cache

The previous technique doesn't seem to work on Windows Store / Universal apps, but I can't find anything that does.