Q&A: How do I uninstall Office:Mac 2011?

Perhaps in response to yesterday’s question about how to prepare for an Office 2011 install, I got the following question this morning via email:

I just installed Office 2011 last night, and noticed that there isn’t a “Remove Office” app like there was in Office 2008.  How do I uninstall Office if I need to?

We made some changes to our installation process in this release, and one result is that you only need to drag your Office folder to the Trash.  This is a great improvement over Office 2008, where people often simply dragged the Office folder to their trash without realising that there was a special application to do it.

10 thoughts on “Q&A: How do I uninstall Office:Mac 2011?”

  1. Was a really useful and helpful article.

    In the same topic. How am I supposed to remove Office Suite 2008 now? Using the assistant it will only find my Excel 2004 but no the latest version…

    Also, if you wouldn’t mind to answer, does Excel 2011 include Data Analysis Tools? I couldn’t find’em

    Thank you, and greets from Spain.

  2. And…wait a minute. Only deleting the Office folder will remove Office from my system? Then what are all those Office files inside ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft?

  3. I made a dumb mistake – purchased Office 2011 and managed to forget that our office server is still on Exchange 2003 …. and the new Outlook will only interface with Exchange 2007 / 2010. Is there a way for me to uninstall just Outlook and run a previous version of Entourage – (I was using Office for Mac 2004) or is it the whole suite or nothing?

    I am hoping I can use the 2011 versions of PowerPoint, Excel and Word and the old version of Entourage until such time as our Exchange server is upgraded when I would upgrade to Outlook.

  4. Gary, I had the same issue. Now I am running office 2011 and office 2008 for mac at the same time, using xls, ppt and doc from the 2011 and Entourage from the 2008, with no problems whatsoever.

    Another option you have is to ask for a refund on the 2011 (home and business) and buy the 2011 students and home, that only have ppt, doc and xls (and it is much cheaper).

    Nonetheless, I still do not understand why Microsoft chose not to support exchange 2003, since still a lot of companies are on that platform.

  5. GiG and Gary, had the same issue. My company also uses Exchange 2003. Very inconvenient. Your discussion has been helpful. I have reverted back to 2008 until we upgrade our server. Thanks.

  6. Hi,
    I tank you so much for your usefull topic.
    The uninstalling of MO2011 was succesfull.

    Tank you.

  7. BEWARE of OFFICE 2011 for MAC!!!! Here’s how to UNINSTALL…

    I am a fairly adept longtime Mac user. I installed Office 2011, and the emergency update 14.0.1, and dove right into using Word 2011. DISASTER. Many crashes. Some that even locked up the whole Mac OS for minutes until the Force Quit could be activated. I particularly had a problem with the “Font Effects” feature, which crashed every time.

    So I called MS for a refund which they gave me right away, and then I asked them about uninstalling since there isn’t an uninstall program in the 2011 package. I got sent to Office Tech Support where a very nice guy walked me through trashing all the various files hidden all over the hard drive. We went through at least 6 or 7 major folder which contained thousands of files. He even took me through the “Private” hidden folder that most people don’t know about because it’s invisible.

    Just trashing the main Office 2001 folder will not get rid of all these other Office files in Libraries (main and user), Preferences, and other locations.

    Call MS Office Tech Support. They said they were being overrun by requests for uninstall help, and that activations for new installations were dropping like a rock. The word is getting out… MS Office 2011 is not ready.

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