If you are using Microsoft's most recent desktop version of Office, Office 2013, you may have noticed that the company has integrated several cloud features in it. You can sign in to your OneDrive account to load and save documents to it for example. While that may be useful for users who make use of the functionality, it is not really needed if you never plan on using it. The feature is displayed to you even if you never plan to use OneDrive or any other cloud hosting service. The following guide provides you with the means to remove the features from Office 2013 so that they are not shown anymore to you. There are two ways to do this: the first adds a new entry to the Windows Registry, the second makes use of the Group Policy Editor. Turn off the cloud features in Office 2013 using the Registry
This method can be used on all systems running Office 2013 which should make it the preferred method in most cases. Here is what you need to do:
To enable the cloud features at a later point in time delete the SignInOptions key again. Using the Group Policy Editor instead The Group Policy Editor is only available in professional versions of Windows which means that you cannot make use of this method if you run a Home or Basic version of Windows. A second requirement is that you need to download and install the Office 2013 Administrative Template files.
To revert the change, change the policy to not configured. The Effect Here you see how the open dialog looks like after you have made the change. |