How to Clear and Delete Recent Documents List in Office 2007 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)

Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint uses new Office Fluent Ribbon user interface with a big right pane section of the Office menu been devoted to “Recent Documents” list. The “Recent Documents” list reconds each and every files that user opens recently, and display the list whenever Office button is pressed for quick easy access.

The “Recent Documents” list shouldn’t be any problem if you’re the only user on the computer. However, if the same computer and same user account is shared by many people, or you’re using a borrowed or public computer, the “Recent Documents” will expose documents using trace. To protect your privacy, users need to delete all file opened history in “Recent Documents”.

  1. Click on Office button, and then click on Word Options (in Word 2007) or Excel Options (in Excel 2007) or PowerPoint Options (in PowerPoint 2007) in the bottom of Office Menu.
  2. Go to the Advanced tab.
  3. Scroll down to the Display section.
  4. Set the value for Show this number of Recent Documents: to 0 (zero).

    Number of Recent Documents

  5. Click OK button.
  6. Repeat steps above again, and set back the value for the number of Recent Documents to show to its original default, i.e. 17. If you don’t want this particular Office 2007 application to remember any Recent Documents, you can leave the value at 0 and skip this step.

Note that you have to do this for each Word, Excel and PowerPoint individually. And if you not intend to delete all entries in “Recent Documents” list, or don’t want to perform the task one by one on many Office 2007 products, it’s possible to clear and delete the “Recent Documents” items, all or some of them, in the registry.

To do so, run Registry Editor (regedit.exe) and navigate to the one of the following registry key branches:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\File MRU
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\File MRU
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\PowerPoint\File MRU

Clear and Delete Recent Documents

Each registry key represent a corresponding Office 2007 product respectively, which should be pretty obviously. Inside the File MRU key, there are plenty of items on the right value pane. Delete any – one, some or all – of the item entries that you want to make disappear and delete from “Recent Documents” list. Restart respective Office 2007 program to see the changes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 4:32 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

13 Responses to “How to Clear and Delete Recent Documents List in Office 2007 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)”

  1. lorrie
    December 17th, 2009 09:25
    13

    Great tip and it helps me a lot. I hated having that list! I was really hoping to find out how to get deleted documents to NOT show up on the list but setting it to zero is better than nothing, at least I don’t have to see a long list of deleted documents!

  2. isaac
    December 2nd, 2009 05:52
    12

    Thanks for the useful assistance here – good tips.

  3. mam
    November 26th, 2009 19:17
    11

    in my word option i cannot click advance.
    i can click only resource…
    Whay should i do ?

  4. なぜあなたは私の名前を知りたいのですか？
    October 2nd, 2009 01:18
    10

    omg im using it on ubuntu and its awesome thanks so much

  5. waah!!
    July 12th, 2009 22:25
    9

    waah!!!…you saved me…i’ve been looking for ages about this one….good thing i never gave up and stumble upon this….arigatou gozaimasu!..it was there all along i was browsing like forever on word options…guess i overlooked it…thank you again..

  6. TDK
    June 10th, 2009 08:29
    8

    This was just what I was looking for! Does anyone know if setting the number of recent documents to show to 0 deletes those entries from the registry?

    Thanks!

  7. John Wright
    May 30th, 2009 18:10
    7

    Recent documents in word. I want them back It is such a pain in the XXXXXXX looking for them through out the hard drive.

  8. mich
    February 22nd, 2009 05:13
    6

    thank you thank you! I had this list and could not get rid of it. It drove me crazy but your hepl was spot on

  9. Sarah
    January 29th, 2009 22:41
    5

    I echo NULL’s comment! He described my exact situation. Please take a look at this for us!

  10. Lota
    January 23rd, 2009 02:29
    4

    By default, How many recent documents does word display in the recent document tab?

  11. Roberto
    November 17th, 2008 19:28
    3

    Muito obrigado pela ajuda! Bem didático e confiável! Obrigado mesmo!

  12. Aninha
    September 13th, 2008 00:09
    2

    Obrigada por este tópico sobre como excluir o histórico do word 2007, valeu! vc me ajudou muito,mais e mais sucesso para teu site,abração :)

  13. NULL
    July 4th, 2008 19:49
    1

    Does anyone know how to enable the option “Show this number of Recent Documents” ?
    In my PC it is disabled -somehow- and the tooltip says that it was disable through group policy by the admin (that would be me)!
    And the value of it is set to 0 !

    Help !
    I want my “recent docs” back, please !

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