Removing the Sign In buttons in Office 2013

     

Office 2013 shows those “Sign In” buttons everywhere. It’s kinda annoying, novice users may screw up and in a corporate environment it’s really not acceptable in most cases.

If you want to disable these items, your most convenient option is controlling it via Group Policy. Here’s how:

  1. Download the administrative templates self-extacting archive according to your version
  2. Run it and extract the files to somewhere
  3. Copy the contents of the admx folder to %SystemRoot%\PolicyDefinitions (C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions normally)
  4. Open the Start Menu or the Start Screen, type gpedit.msc and start it by pressing Return
  5. Browse to User Configuration / Administrative Templates / Microsoft Office 2013 / Miscellaneous
  6. Open the Block signing into Office option, set it to Enabled and choose None allowed in the dropdown.

That’s it. You may wanna run gpupdate /force in a command prompt (cmd.exe) for the changes to take effect, but you should be fine afterwards.