What To Do If Office 2010 or 2007 Won’t Uninstall

If the standard uninstallation of Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 does not work properly then you will need a different way to remove it.

Sometimes you may need to uninstall Office 2007 or 2010 – e.g. before selling a computer you could remove it so that you can reuse the license and install it on a new computer, or you may have a trial version of MS Office you don’t want to keep.

You should first try removing it in the usual way from Add/Remove Programs or Control Panel/Programs and it may uninstall correctly. However, in our computer repair business, we often see computers where the uninstall procedure just doesn’t work and the user is stuck with a version of Office that doesn’t work (or a trial that has expired) but can’t be removed.

How To Remove MS Office 2007 or 2010 If Uninstall Fails

Microsoft used to offer the Windows Installer Cleanup utility which aimed to clean the Windows registry of invalid program information (to allow the removal of programs such as Microsoft Office) but they stopped offering this utility because of the problems it caused – while it resolved some installation problems, it could damage other components on the computer.

Therefore we cannot recommend it but a simple alternative is to use a free program purposely designed to strip out all remnants of MS Office – for use when the normal uninstall has failed.

There are 2 different versions of the aptly named Remove Office 2007 or Remove Office 2010 program available to download from the developer here – they are both listed in the menu bar at the top of the page.

  • Remove Office 2007 works on XP and Vista but does not work on Windows 7.
  • Remove Office 2010 works on XP, Vista and Windows 7.

To use the utility, just download the relevant program and double click to run it – follow the instructions and it should remove the pesky leftovers of MS Office for you.

If necessary, it may help to run the utility whilst in Safe Mode to ensure that all elements of Office can be removed.

1 thought on “What To Do If Office 2010 or 2007 Won’t Uninstall”

  1. Woked well for me after i couldnt get rid of the stupid 2007 trial that Dell put on my laptop without asking me, cheers

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