2 ways to disable Office’s invite for file format

Gonzague Dambricourt

5 years ago

Looking for the registry key or Powershell script that will help you get rid of the Office invite asking for a default file type? The solution is as follows..

The window above displays at Office’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint’s first startup when installed in Europe. It asks for the user to pick their default file format, either Office Open XML or OpenDocument.

But it is a bit of a pain if you want to make a very fluid user experience when doing mass deploys. So there is a way to skip it

How to disable Office’s file type invite

You can either manually edit the registry or use a powershell script.

Where in the register?

Here : HKCU:SOFTWAREMicrosoftOffice16.0CommonGeneral

More precisely the key is called ShownFileFmtPrompt. If its value is 1, Office doesnt show the prompt. The value’s type is REG_DWord

And if I wanna do that with Powershell?

Two very simple commands :

## Desactive la demande au lancement Office pour XML ou pas
## contexte d'ex : pas utilisateur
## Par Gonzague Dambricourt 
## https://fr.wikitwist.com

New-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:SOFTWAREMicrosoftOffice16.0CommonGeneral" -Name "ShownFileFmtPrompt" -PropertyType DWord -Value 1 -ErrorAction Stop
Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKCU:SOFTWAREMicrosoftOffice16.0CommonGeneral" -Name ShownFileFmtPrompt -Value 1 -ErrorAction Stop

They have a different role so up to you to adjust.. The first one creates the value ShownFileFmtPrompt, the second sets ShownFileFmtPrompt

So there you go, a small Powershell .ps1 file 🙂

This post is also available in fr_FR.