As part of preparing to deploy Office 2016 in my own environment, I wanted to be able to suppress the various “What’s New” dialog windows which are displayed on Office 2016 applications’ first launch to market the applications’ features.
Using the Microsoft Volume License installer to install Office 2016 (or using the volume license serializer package to install the volume license) will include automatic functionality to stop the version-specific “What’s New” dialog windows from appearing. However, I also needed to be able to suppress the initial “What’s New” dialog windows that appear the first launch of Office applications.
In order to suppress the initial “What’s New” dialog windows, certain settings need to be applied to the following files:
- /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Outlook.plist
- /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.PowerPoint.plist
- /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Excel.plist
- /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist
- /Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.onenote.mac.plist
Setting: kSubUIAppCompletedFirstRunSetup1507 – boolean value (true / false)
Function: Suppresses the “What’s New” dialog for Office 2016 applications’ first launch.
Applied to the following files:
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Outlook.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.PowerPoint.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Excel.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.onenote.mac.plist
Setting: FirstRunExperienceCompletedO15 – boolean value (true / false)
Function: Suppresses additional “What’s New” dialog for Outlook and OneNote.
Applied to the following files:
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Outlook.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.onenote.mac.plist
Note: That is a capital letter O in O15, not zero15.
Setting: SendAllTelemetryEnabled – boolean value (true / false)
Function: Suppresses the offer to send crash reports to Microsoft.
Applied to the following files:
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Outlook.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.PowerPoint.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Excel.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.onenote.mac.plist
To automate the deployment of these settings, I’ve developed a script. For more details, see below the jump.
This script is designed to check for individual Office 2016 applications. If an Office 2016 application is found on the Mac in question, the specific settings to suppress the “What’s New” dialog for that application are applied.
The script and an associated payload-free package are available on Github at the following address:
