How to Disable or Restrict New “Backgrounds” Feature in Microsoft Office 2013 Applications?

Microsoft has introduced a new “Background” feature in the new Office 2013 suite. Using this new feature, you can select a desired image from a given set of images which is shown in top-right corner of Office 2013 application window. Its a nice addition to Office 2013 UI.

You can select these cool background images only if you are logged in using a Windows Live ID in Office 2013 application as mentioned here. If you are not logged in, this feature will not be available in your Office account settings page.

Sometimes you might want to disable this feature in your computer. There are many people who don’t like eye candy effects and if you like the clean and minimal interface of Office 2013 and don’t want to show any background image in Office applications, you can disable this background feature using Windows Registry.

In this tutorial, we’ll tell you a Registry tweak which will help you in removing background feature from Office 2013. It’ll help you in restricting other users from changing or applying background images in Office 2013 applications. After applying the trick, no one would be able to select backgrounds in Office 2013 programs even if the user is logged in using Windows Live account.

If you also want to disable or restrict backgrounds in Office 2013 programs, check out following simple steps:

1. Press “WIN+R” key combination to launch RUN dialog box then type regedit and press Enter. It’ll open Registry Editor.

2. Now go to following key:

3. In right-side pane, create a new DWORD DisableBackgrounds and set its value to 1

4. That’s it. It’ll remove the option to select backgrounds in Office 2013 account settings page and no one will be able to select backgrounds.

PS: If you don’t want to modify Registry yourself and want a ready-made Registry script to do the task automatically, download following ZIP file, extract it and you’ll get a .REG file to disable background feature in Office 2013:

Download Registry Script to Disable Backgrounds in Microsoft Office 2013