OfficeAdRemover - Disable Microsoft Office 2010 Starter Advertisements

Recently I bought a new PC with preinstalled Office 2010 Starter and I found that it has annoying ads that change often and disturb while working. Although I have bought Office 2007, I decided to keep Office 2010 Starter for testing purposes.

One day I was really upset about the ads and tried to find out on the internet how to disable them. Since I haven't found any trick, I decided to write my own utility that disables ads from MS Word and Excel 2010 Starter.

You can see the result on the following video and screenshots. Enjoy!

Screenshots & video

Word Starter with ad bar Word Starter with removed ad bar Excel Starter with ad bar Excel Starter with removed ad bar

How does it work?

If OfficeAdRemover is running, it regularly looks for the advertisement bar and closes it.

OfficeAdRemover doesn't modify any MS Office files and any other files in your system. If OfficeAdRemover isn't running, advertisements are displayed as usually. If you remove OfficeAdRemover from your system, you completely return to your previous configuration.

OfficeAdRemover does not need administrator rights when running.

Is this trick legal?

I am not a lawyer but I think it is completely legal. The utility is not a crack or anything that breaks the software, it just closes the ad window. And closing windows must be legal - the user is definitely not supposed to keep all the windows on his desktop opened, is he? Anyway, there are plenty of AdBlockers for every web browser, then why not for MS Office?

Small remark

I suppose Microsoft will try to "close the door" and rewrite the ad bar so that it can't be closed so easily, so disable automatic updates for your Office Starter...

Disable OfficeAdRemover tray icon

Start OfficeAdRemover.exe with "silent" parameter ("OfficeAdRemover.exe silent") if you don't want the tray icon to be shown. In this case, you have to kill the program manually in the task list.

Download

English version: Deutsche Version / German version:

Change log

1.4
Bug fix: Versions up to 1.3 blocked context-sensitive help in Word.

1.3
"silent" param to start OfficeAdRemover without tray icon.

1.1 -> 1.2
Thesaurus in Word is not blocked any more.

Licence

OfficeAdRemover is freeware.

(c) Ondrej Pokorny, http://www.kluug.at

"No-Warranty-Supplement:"
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, OfficeAdRemover IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE AUTHORS SHALL NOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT MAY RESULT FROM THE USE OF OfficeAdRemover. YOU USE OfficeAdRemover ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Contact

Contact me for more information (you can write in czech/english/german/russian): Email