How to uninstall all Office 365 Instances

Admin

Quite often when buying a new PC or laptop it will come with Office 365 installed. Often it comes with multiple language installs. This can particularly be a problem when having to switch architecture installs. For example removing all 64 bit versions of Office as 32 bit Office is needed for a legacy app

So what is the easiest way to resolve this?

  1. Manually go into program and features and uninstall every instance. This takes patience as this will take a while
  2. Reinstall Windows using a clean image. Get rid of all the Office 365 instances and bloatware in one go and use a fresh installer downloaded from Microsoft
  3. Run a PowerShell Script to remove all instances

PowerShell Script

To use a PowerShell Script to uninstall all Office 365 and OneNote instances, I used the below which is based on a script I found on GitHub here

The script comes in two stages

Uninstall all Office Instances

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Force

$OfficeUninstallStrings = (Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall\* | Where {$\_.DisplayName -like "Microsoft 365"} | Select UninstallString).UninstallString    

ForEach ($UninstallString in $OfficeUninstallStrings) {        $UninstallEXE = ($UninstallString -split '"')\[1\]        $UninstallArg = ($UninstallString -split '"')\[2\] + " DisplayLevel=False"        Start-Process -FilePath $UninstallEXE -ArgumentList $UninstallArg -Wait    }

Uninstall all OneNote Instances

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted -Force

$OneNoteUninstallStrings = (Get-ItemProperty HKLM:\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Uninstall\* | Where {$\_.DisplayName -like "Microsoft OneNote"} | Select UninstallString).UninstallString    

ForEach ($UninstallString in $OneNoteUninstallStrings) {        $UninstallEXE = ($UninstallString -split '"')\[1\]        $UninstallArg = ($UninstallString -split '"')\[2\] + " DisplayLevel=False"        Start-Process -FilePath $UninstallEXE -ArgumentList $UninstallArg -Wait    }

Once completed and all instances have been removed, you can install the office variation of your choice, whether a different architecture or another version such as Office 2024 Home and Business.

You can of course also restrict the PowerShell Execution Policy afterwards to keep your systems secure

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