Office applications like Word, PowerPoint and Excel will show you a startup screen whenever you launch the app. This is a default setup both in Windows and Mac Office 365 and previous versions. If you are annoyed with the startup screen, here is how you can disable startup screen in Word and other applications.
What is Startup Screen?
If you are not clear what is startup screen, here is how it will look in Windows Word.
If you are using Office 365 on Mac, here is the startup screen of Word.
Related: How to fix slow Word documents when working?
Why You Need to Disable Startup Screen?
Some people may refer this startup screen as Word Gallery or Document Gallery as it shows the gallery of document templates. You can do multiple things with the screen:
- Find the beautiful templates which you can select and start building your document.
- Open previously accessed documents.
- Quickly pin documents for easy access by right clicking and adding to “Pinned” tab.
- Check the documents shared with you when you are working in collaborative mode.
- In addition, you can few other things using the available menu items.
Now, you may wonder why someone should disable this startup screen. There are few good reasons for that:
- If you always open a blank document to start your work. Disabling the startup screen will save a time that every time you do not need to select blank document template.
- Want to have private documents not showing automatically when you are using shared computer. Let us take an example that you are using a shared computer in your family for preparing a quick document. First, when you or someone launch the application the file name will be shown in the recently accessed list. Further, someone may intentionally open by looking at the file name.
- You are recording a video or sharing screen and do not want to show the username and file names when launching Office documents like a PowerPoint presentation.
At any case, follow the below instructions if the screen is not the one you want to view.
How to Disable Startup Screen in Windows Word?
You can view the startup screen in most of the Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In this article we will explain with Word, you can follow the same instructions for other applications.
- Launch Word to view the startup screen and click on the “Options” menu on the left sidebar. Attentively, go to “Files > Options” from any open document.
- This will open “Word Options” dialog box having plenty of settings to customize Word. Make sure you are in “General” tab and look under “Start up options” section.
- Disable the checkbox against the option “Show the Start screen when this application starts”.
- Click “OK” button to save and close the dialog box.
- Now, close the application and relaunch it again. You will not see the startup screen and Word will automatically open a blank document.
How to Disable Startup Screen in Mac Word?
Follow the below instructions, if you are using Office 365 Word version in Mac.
- Launch Word and open a blank document.
- Go to “Word > Preferences…” menu or press “Command + Comma” shortcut keys.
- This will open “Word Preferences” dialog box and click on “General” icon.
- On the next “General” dialog box, look under “Settings” section.
- Disable the checkbox against “Show Document Gallery when opening Word”.
- Simply close the dialog box and Word will automatically save your changes.
- Now, close your document and the app. Relaunch Word again and you will no more seeing the startup screen or document gallery.
Note: This setting will only disable the screen and not any files. You can still go to “File > Open Recent” menu to view recently accessed files.
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