How To Disable Or Turn Off Start Screen In Office 2013

One of the new features of Office 2013 is the all new Start screen. Yes, Microsoft has introduced Start screen in the next version of Office suite as well, just like in Windows 8. The Start screen in Office is completely different from the Windows 8 Start screen and appears when you launch one of the Office apps.

The left of the Start screen shows recently used documents and the right displays a number templates as well as your account information. The Office Start screen is pretty useful as one can quickly open recently opened documents and start a new document by clicking on your favorite template.

While the Start screen is certainly a nice feature and will help many users, it’s not a cool feature for users who always start with a black template. As you know, majority of Office users love to start with a black template (blank document) and don’t have the patience to click on the blank document every time.

Even though the Start screen doesn’t appear when you right-click on a document and open using a Office program, you need click on a template or choose a recently opened file every time you launch a program.

Thankfully, an option is available to turn off the Office 2013 Start screen for single or all apps. That is, you can disable the Start screen for Word, Excel, or PowerPoint,  or you can disable the feature for all Office programs. Just follow the given below instructions to turn off the Office 2013 Start screen.

Step 1: Launch Office Word, Excel or any other program for which you want to turn off the Start screen. For instance, if you don’t want to see the Start screen when you open Word program, launch the same.

Step 2: When the Start screen appears, click or tap a template to see the actual Office window.

Step 3: Click or tap File and then click or tap Options that appears on the left to open Options dialog.

Step 4: Here, click or tap General on the navigation pane, and then disable the option named Show the Start screen when this application starts. Click or tap OK to save the setting. You are done! Close and restart the program to directly see the Office productivity area.

Please note that turning off the Start screen in a program won’t turn off the Start screen for other installed programs. For instance, turning off Start screen in Word program won’t disable the Excel start screen and vice versa. So, if you want to turn off the Start screen for all programs, you need to open all programs one-by-one and turn off the feature by following above mentioned steps.