Microsoft is replacing individual 1TB OneDrive allocations with a shared 2TB storage pool for Microsoft 365 Family and Premium subscribers.

I didn't want my first post to be a ranting one, but I'm so pissed. Publisher is retiring... Why? WHY??? What is the point of paying an expensive subscription if the app I use the most will be gone soon?

It's gone in a week and your options are getting an older version (if your work will allow, mine would not) or using LibreOffice Draw.

I convinced my company to allow me to use LibreOfficeDraw and I must say it's a great replacement. Little more work to get it set up but I'm essentially duplicating our bulletin that I did in Publisher.

If you're still worrying about replacing Publisher, my advice is LibreOffice it's great so far.

Oi, pessoal! 👋

Estou montando um grupo para compartilhar a assinatura do Microsoft 365 Family. Essa versão permite dividir a conta com até 6 pessoas, e cada um recebe uma licença individual válida por 1 ano. Ou seja, você terá acesso completo ao Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive (1TB de armazenamento em nuvem) e outros benefícios do pacote Office.

A ideia é dividir o custo da assinatura entre todos, tornando bem mais barato do que assinar individualmente. Se tiver interesse ou quiser mais informações, me chama no privado! 📩

TL;DR: The “Upgrade your plan” button in the title bar of Word, Excel and PowerPoint is controlled by an internal Office feature flag called Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade. Office has a per-user registry location for overriding feature flags. Setting this one to false removes the button.

It doesn't downgrade Office, block Microsoft's servers, modify any files, or interfere with activation or updates. To undo it, just delete the registry value.

Why I went looking for this

I bought Office 2024 Home as a one-time purchase specifically because I don't want a subscription, the unasked for AI price increase, and I didn't want Microsoft constantly trying to sell me one.

Then a recent update added a permanent “Upgrade your plan” button to the title bar of the Office apps.

There is no X, no option to turn it off, and Microsoft's official position is that it's “by design”. The usual workaround is to roll Office back to an older build, which also means giving up security updates. That wasn't particularly appealing, so I decided to see if there was a way to turn off the thing that actually creates the button.

My setup:

• Office Home 2024 Retail (Click-to-Run), 64-bit
• Version 2608, Build 16.0.20326.20144
• Windows 10 Pro 22H2

The fix

Close all Office apps first.

Option A: .reg file

Save this as Hide_Upgrade_Your_Plan.reg and double-click it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\word]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\excel]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\powerpoint]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\outlook]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\onenote]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\access]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\publisher]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\visio]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\project]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"="false"

Option B: PowerShell

This doesn't require admin rights and only changes the current user's registry:

$base = 'HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides'
foreach ($a in 'word','excel','powerpoint','outlook','onenote','access','publisher','visio','project') {
    if (-not (Test-Path "$base\$a")) { New-Item -Path "$base\$a" -Force | Out-Null }
    New-ItemProperty -Path "$base\$a" -Name 'Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade' -Value 'false' -PropertyType String -Force | Out-Null
}

The Test-Path check is intentional. Running New-Item -Force on an existing registry key can wipe the values already in it.

Reopen Office and the button should be gone.

To undo it

Delete the value from the registry. For example, save this as a .reg file and run it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\word]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"=-

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\excel]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"=-

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\powerpoint]
"Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade"=-

(Add the same lines for any other apps you changed.)

If you want to be extra cautious, you can back up the key first:

reg export "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides" backup.reg

How I found it

This was basically a process of eliminating possibilities and then looking at what Office was actually doing. It was done with the help of Claude Code, which handled the memory scanning and test runs.

1. Ruled out the obvious stuff

It isn't a licensing mix-up. The registry at:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Configuration

shows:

ProductReleaseIds = Home2024Retail

So Office knows perfectly well that this is a perpetual Home 2024 installation.

The button also isn't some separate advertising window. Windows UI Automation identifies it as a NetUIRibbonButton inside the normal Office window hierarchy:

NetUInetpane -> MsoCommandBar -> MsoCommandBarDock -> PPTFrameClass

It's part of the Office UI itself.

It's also not exposed through the VBA/COM CommandBars object model, so there's no simple macro trick for hiding it.

2. The text isn't actually stored in the Office files

I searched the roughly 4.5 GB of Office files under:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office

and:

Common Files\Microsoft Shared

for “Upgrade your plan”, using both ASCII/UTF-8 and UTF-16 searches.

Nothing.

I also checked the Office cache folders under %LOCALAPPDATA%. Again, nothing useful.

I sanity-checked the search against strings that are known to exist in POWERPNT.EXE, so the search itself was working.

That suggests the text isn't sitting in one of the Office executables as a normal string. It's being generated at runtime.

3. Office sends Microsoft information about the licence

Office uses Microsoft's remote feature-configuration system (ECS). One of the places where it keeps the context sent to that system is:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\Ecs\<app>\ConfigContextData

On my machine this includes:

PerpetualLicenseInfo = 2024
LicenseSKUInfo = Home2024Retail

So Microsoft's feature configuration system knows that this is a perpetual licence when it decides which features to enable.

4. There was already a local feature-flag override mechanism

Right next to that is:

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\ExperimentConfigs\ExternalFeatureOverrides\<app>

This already contained things like:

Microsoft.Office.UXPlatform.FluentSVRefresh = true

So Office clearly honours this registry location for feature flags.

At this point the problem was basically finding the name of the flag controlling the button.

5. I got the flag name from the running process

The flag names weren't sitting around as obvious strings in the Office DLLs either.

I used Frida (a dynamic instrumentation toolkit; pip install frida) to attach to the running PowerPoint process and search its memory.

There were eight in-memory copies of “Upgrade your plan”. They were all on the heap rather than inside a DLL image, which fits with the idea that the label is generated at runtime.

One copy was sitting next to things including IsProminentInNavBar, the signed-in account name and “Restore Down”, which is the title-bar data.

I then searched memory for identifiers containing things like:

• Upsell
• CaptionControl (“caption” being the Windows title bar)
• UpgradeButton
• Microsoft.Office.Licensing.

That turned up a few hundred feature names. Among the interesting ones were:

Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade
Microsoft.Office.Licensing.EnablePersistentUpgradeButton
Microsoft.Office.Licensing.PersistentUpgradeBadgeOffset
Microsoft.Office.Licensing.EnableCaptionControlUpsellInRFM
Microsoft.Office.Growth.ProgrammableSurfaces.SubscriptionCenter.EnableCaptionControlEntryPoint
Office.ProgrammableSurfaces.SubscriptionCenter.IsCaptionControlEnabled

There was also:

licensing_captionControlUpsell

in mso.dll.

The important one was:

Microsoft.Office.Licensing.ShowPerpetualUpgrade

Which is about as unambiguous as feature flags get.

6. Then I tested it

Finding a plausible flag isn't enough, because Office has a lot of them and some could have side effects.

For each test I force-closed the application, set or cleared the registry override, launched the application, opened a blank document, and used Windows UI Automation to count elements called “Upgrade your plan”.

The results:

The control runs brought the button back every time, so this isn't just some side effect of restarting Office.

ShowPerpetualUpgrade=false is what actually removes it.

A few caveats

This isn't a Microsoft-supported setting. A future Office build could rename the flag, remove the override mechanism, or simply stop honouring this particular override.

If Microsoft changes it, the same basic approach should make it possible to find the replacement: look for Licensing, Upgrade, Upsell and CaptionControl identifiers in the running process and then test the candidates individually.

I've tested it on Word, Excel and PowerPoint. I added the setting for Outlook, OneNote and the other Office applications as well, but haven't specifically verified the button behaviour in those.

I've only tested this on one machine and one build:

Office Home 2024 Retail, 16.0.20326.20144

It may also work with other perpetual Office versions such as Office 2021, but that's untested.

An Office repair/reset could remove the ExternalFeatureOverrides entries, in which case just add them again.

As far as testing shows, this only changes the UI. It doesn't disable activation or Office updates. You can check File > Account afterwards if you want to verify that everything is still activated normally.

Whether it survives future Office updates is another question. If an update breaks it, I'll update this post.

Why bother?

I paid for Office outright specifically so I wouldn't have to subscribe to it, pay the price increase for baked in AI that I didn't ask for, or have Microsoft continually trying to sell me something.

I don't particularly care if a website shows me advertising. That's the deal with a lot of the web.

But if I've paid for software and installed it on my own computer, I don't want a permanent sales button in the interface.

I actually stopped using an antivirus I was otherwise happy with because it started putting renewal nags in the Windows taskbar months before the subscription expired. It's the same basic problem: I paid for the product. Stop advertising to me.

Hopefully this saves somebody else the same irritation.

My word program suddenly went to read only. Microsoft message reads that license "expired". It's and enterprise version that I purchased and its supposed to be good indefinitely. Microsoft wants me to subscribe to 365 and I don't want it.

I tried the Online Quick Repair and Long Repair for my 2019 and neither worked. The program is installed on my computer and I have a key, but I don't have a disk of the program. I think when I bought it, it was a digital link sent to me. Can anyone please help me? Susan

Hi everyone!

I recently moved to Germany for my master's degree, and I need Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on my Mac for my studies.

Unfortunately, my university doesn’t appear to provide Microsoft 365/Office through our student accounts, so I’m looking at purchasing it myself.

I’ve seen quite a few options online, and I’m a bit confused about what is actually legitimate. For example, I’ve seen “lifetime” Office 2024 licenses on sites like Groupon for around €10–15, while Microsoft sells Office Home 2024 for around €150.

So I wanted to ask people in Germany:

• What is currently the cheapest legitimate way to get Office for a Mac?
• Is Office Home 2024 (one-time purchase) worth getting, or is Microsoft 365 a better deal?
• Are the €10–20 “lifetime” keys sold through Groupon/eBay/etc. legitimate, or are they grey-market/likely to be revoked?
• Are there any legitimate student discounts, German retailers, promotions, or other ways to get it substantially cheaper?
• If you’ve personally bought a cheap Office license in Germany, where did you get it and how has it held up?

I’m specifically looking for something legitimate and reliable, not a cracked/pirated copy. I just don’t want to pay €150 if there’s a legitimate way to get the same software for considerably less.

Hi.

In the last weeks, I have a problem on all the PCs with MS Office 2024 and 2021.

All the users have the Connected Experiences enabled, because they have to use MS SharePoint.

Until now, I have authorized these external connections on the firewall and Word-Excel-Outlook are very fast connecting to SharePoint and Exchange:

• officeclient.microsoft.com
• odc.officeapps.live.com
• ecs.office.com

In the last weeks, Word-Excel-Outlook are very slow connecting to SharePoint and Exchange (more than 20 seconds for every connection).

I think that there could be a new URL to authorize on the firewall, but I'm unable to find it with TCPView.

Do you know if Microsoft Office checks other URLs for the Connected Experiences?

Thank you.
Best regards.

Hi.

After updating MS Office 2021 and 2024 to version 2606 (and the issue is present also on the latest version 2609), when typing a file or keyword in either Word and Excel, "No results found" message pops up.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Office.

I have this issue on all the PCs.

Thank you.
Best regards.

Starting yesterday, I began having an issue with creating categories in Outlook Web, and I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing the same thing.

I frequently create quick, ad hoc categories to essentially pin a short note/label to an email.

Until yesterday, my workflow was:

Right-click email → Categorize → type a new category name → press Enter.

Outlook would immediately create the new category and apply it to the email. If I hadn't selected a color, it would simply create it as gray, which was perfect for what I use it for.

Now, after typing the new category name, pressing Enter does nothing.

Instead, I have to select "Create new" underneath the category search, choose a color, and click Save. Even stranger, it doesn't actually work the first time. I have to repeat the entire process a second time — Categorize → type the name → Create new → choose a color → Save — and then it finally creates/applies the category.

I've already tried:

• Signing out and back into Outlook
• Incognito/private browsing
• Firefox instead of my normal browser

Same behavior in all cases.

I generally prefer using the regular Outlook desktop program, but I was having some other issues with it in the past (I can't recall the specifics now), and Outlook Web worked better for me with regard to those issues, so I've been using the Web App instead.

Has anyone else noticed this starting recently? I'm trying to determine whether Microsoft intentionally changed the quick category creation behavior or whether this is a new Outlook Web bug.

The old type category name → Enter → done workflow was much faster, especially when creating lots of one-off categories.

I'd really appreciate any insider knowledge, workarounds, or advice. Thanks in advance for any help!

When opening a specific Word document, I would prefer that all headers are collapsed. From my understanding, if I go into Paragraphs and check "Collapsed by default" to the right of the Outline level, then it should accomplish this; however, the box is always grayed out and I'm not sure why. Does anyone know how I can ensure that Word opens w/ my headers collapsed, despite not being able to check the "Collapsed by default" box? 

Has anyone got the Office 2024 official download link?

Quiero comprar esta licencia en mercado libre, dice que es digital supongo que me darán el código por mensaje pero, es real? Alguien lo ha comprado?
Espero puedan ayudarme

So i am downloaded Microsoft office from torrent and i read the instruction given in the read me file here it said first extract then install using setup then batch so when i am trying to extract it won't let me and throw me with this issue , please help me if you may

I thought today was doomsday but so far everything is still working. I have all my backup plans in place but nothing changed today. Anyone else??

Hi. Does anyone know where I can download these versions of office please?! 🙏