Hello everyone. Today I will be talking about how to turn off Add-Ins in Microsoft Office. Add-ins are software that is added into Microsoft Office applications to, usually, allow them to work in conjunction with other applications. An example of this would be a database application that contains customer details and has letter templates. When you click on the letter template the template will open up as a document in Word. This is due to the add-in that would have been automatically installed on Office when the application has been installed. This allows for better integration amongst numerous applications.

However, sometimes these add-ins from 3rd party software can cause issue’s with office. On occasion I have seen them have effects on Office applications that cause Office to either not work the way it should or not work at all. in these instances, you should disable the add-ins one at a time to determine if any of them are causing the issues. To do this you need to:

1. In the affected Office application, go to File and then click on Options. This located on the left hand side between Help and Exit
2. Once in the options control panel, click on the add-In’s tab. This is located on the lower left hand side of the control panel
3. The Add-in’s Panel will display all the Add-ins that are active, inactive, document related and disabled. At the bottom is a drop down list of Add-ins to manage. Choose “COM Add-Ins” and then click “Go…”.
4. You should now has a list of all the COM add-ins. If they have a tick next to them then they are active. If they don’t then they are inactive. To deactivate the ad-in just un-tick the box next to a particular add-ins and press ok. You can also remove or add add-ins in this panel.

If you can’t even do that (I have had an instance when an add-in had not allowed access to file tab to I couldn’t access the options) then you should start up the Office application in safe mode. To do this click on start and type in the search bar the name of the application followed by “/safe”. This will start up the application with all add-ins disabled and will allow to try try and (hopefully) find what is wrong with Office and fix it.

I hop ethis has helped you. Thanks for reading!