Prevent Microsoft Office from auto-populating Start Menu

Question

So I'm new to Windows 10, and I'm using Classic Shell (which latches onto the Windows-native Start Menu infrastructure) in order to be able to have an old-style Start Menu which I find much more usable than Windows 10's default.

What I'm trying to do is get my Office 365 software into a Start Menu folder, because I really have no desire to have them cluttering up my Start Menu, particularly as I have the 5 Office programs I use most often set up on my task bar, anyway.

My initial solution was to create a subfolder from within the Start Menu and moving the Start Menu shortcuts there.

My custom folders are located in C:\~\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

The default Office shortcuts are in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

Here's the rub: It turns out if you remove the default Office shortcuts, MS Office will helpfully re-add them there the next time you start it. So while I now have a subfolder, every time I start office the non-nested shortcuts come back, somewhat defeating the point of the exercise.

Is there any way to suppress this behaviour? Some setting, registry key, or other workaround? (short of brute removing write permissions from SYSTEM, which would probably create more problems than it solves)

Answer 1

Instead of deleting these app shortcuts from Office, just right click on each one of them and go to PROPERTIES > GENERAL, then check the "Hidden" box in the Attributes area at the bottom.

It's not a permanent solution, since every time MS updates windows, they will become unhidden. However, it should stop these annoying menu entries from showing for a long, long time.

Answer 2

So while I now have a subfolder, every time I start office the non-nested shortcuts come back,

I don't get this behaviour. It only happens to me when an update gets pushed out by my employer. You're right though, removing permissions from the start menu is probably not a good idea.

Even though it is only on updates for me, it still annoys me that the updater seems incapable of spotting that I've moved the Start menu shortcuts to be under their own "Microsoft Office" sub-menu. Every time I get an update, I end up manually moving the "new" shortcuts over the old ones in the sub-menu. Luckily, in Windows 10 the structure behind the scenes is not much different to that in Windows 7.

To help me out, I created 2 folder shortcuts (conveniently placed in my Documents):

1. A shortcut called "Windows Start Menu", linking to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

2. A shortcut called "Microsoft Office Start Menu", linking to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Microsoft Office

I open both of these and simply drag the Office shortcuts from 1 to 2, overwriting anything that might already be there.

As a result, my start menu has a sub-menu called "Microsoft Office" with all of Office in there, rather than having Excel under "E", Powerpoint under "P", Word under "W", and so on in the main menu.

Answer 3

Yep. That is so infuriating. As suggested above, I essentially abandoned the start menu for my own separate menus. I keep an "all" with everything I have, a "primary" folder for most commonly-used apps, and additional menus focused on particular activities. Windows is much more pleasant now.

My Primary Menu with my choice of shortcuts untouched by MS or any vendor

Answer 4

Sorry, but that is not possible. Instead, you could come to the regular start menu, and then put all your programs into a folder.