If you’ve been having problems with Office 2016 on your Surface, it could be due to add-ins installed by 3rd party software. In this article, I’m going to tell you what Office 2016 add-ins are and how you can easily manage them to keep your Microsoft Office applications running smoothly.
Manage Office 2016 Add-ins: What Are They?
Add-ins are little extensions to the Office 2016 applications that, usually, add some small functionality. For example, if you’re using BitDefender Internet Security as your anti-virus package, it inserts an Office add-in that’s intended to help eliminate email spam in Outlook. You will find that there are many add-ins, some of them even made by Microsoft itself.
Unfortunately, Office add-ins sometimes negatively impact system performance; they can conflict with each other and may even break things.
Manage Office 2016 Add-ins: OfficeIns
Managing these plug-ins (or add-ins) manually can be a pain because it usually means tracking down and editing a registry entry. Fortunately, you can download a piece of software called OfficeIns which makes it easy.
With OfficeIns, you can easily search and sort the installed plug-ins. You can also change their startup behaviour and even disable them with just a few clicks. While some add-ins give you a description of what they do, some don’t. In that case, you’ll want to Google the Prog.ID to see if it’s important or not.
I would recommend that you proceed with caution when removing any add-in that was created by Microsoft because it’s likely that it provides a functionality you need for things to work correctly.
If an add-in is not important and you don’t think you want/need it, you can disable it by right-clicking on it then changing the Start Mode to Disabled.
Once you do that, start the appropriate Office 2016 application to make sure it’s working correctly. If it is, great!! If not, you might want to re-enable the add-in.
Now that you can easily manage your Office 2016 add-ins, you may find that your Surface runs better while using Microsoft Office.
Tim
