Microsoft Office 2013 Tip: How To Disable Start Screen

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Microsoft Office 2013 is designed for Windows 8, so it’s no surprise seeing the Start Screen embedded in the design. If you haven’t tried, the Office version of Start Screen is the first screen you will see after you launch any of the Microsoft Office application. It’s useful, touch oriented but if you are an old school Microsoft Office you may not like this new design. And luckily, if you don’t like it, you can disable it.

Disable Start Screen in individual Office Application

In each Office Application, e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, there is a quick option that you can use to turn on and off Start Screen. Simply open the application you want to disable the Start Screen, let’s say Word, click Open Other Documents at the bottom of the sidebar screen, and go to Options.

In the Options screen, you can quickly spot the option “Show the Start screen when this application starts” at the bottom of the General section. Unchecking it will disable the Start Screen in this specific application.

Word Option disable Start Screen thumb - Microsoft Office 2013 Tip: How To Disable Start Screen

Disable Start Screen in all Office Application

The steps described above only disable the Start Screen in individual Office applications, which means that disabling it in Word will not disable it in Excel automatically. So is there any way to disable Start Screen in all Office Application without going to individual application and doing it there?

You can only do that through a registry tweak.

1. Open Registry Editor by pressing Win+R keyboard shortcut, typing in Regedit, and pressing Enter.

2. Navigator to the following registry key.

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\General

3. Create a new DWORD 32 registry key in the right-side panel, name it DisableBootToOfficeStart and set its value to 1.

Office Disable Start Screen Registry thumb - Microsoft Office 2013 Tip: How To Disable Start Screen

The change takes affect immediately right after the value of the key is changed. And from now on, the Start Screen will be disabled and bypassed in every single Office Application. If you want to re-enable it, you can either delete the registry key described above or re-enable it in individual application.

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