How to Disable Recent Documents History in Office 2007 Excel, Word and PowerPoint

Expanded Recent Documents history list in Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint 2007 is useful as a quick shortcut to open recently used files, spreadsheets and presentations. But for users who handle sensitive or private documents, “Recent Documents” history will expose the trace and existence of otherwise hidden files. If you are sure that you don’t want to utilize the enhanced Recent Documents feature in Office 2007, there is a way to disable the history tracking on opened files.

Use steps in guide below to disable Recent Documents history list for good so that Office 2007 applications will not keep track and save the recently opened files history, also known as MRU list.

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).

   

5. Click OK button.
6. Repeat steps above again for each and every Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007 that .

The “Recent Documents” list will appear blank forever.

It’s also possible to set a registry value to enable a policy that prevent displaying of any MRU lists. However, note that the policy will affect and honor by most Microsoft programs, such as all versions of Office and its individual products, so if you use this registry trick to turn of the policy no most recently used files history will be saved for all programs, including MRUs on the File menu and the Save and Open dialog boxes.

1. Run Registry Editor (regedit).
2. Navigate to the following registry key:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
   CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

   If “Explorer” is not existed, create a new Key for “Explorer”.

3. Create a DWORD value with the key NoRecentDocsHistory and set the value to 1.

   

All “Recent Documents” list will not be saved and all display will turn blank.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 4:34 am and is filed under Tips & Tricks. 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.