Get rid of Teams buttons from your Office ribbon
Teams is creeping into Outlook ribbons as Microsoft tries to promote itself. Here’s how to get rid of it or any other Office buttons you don’t want.
Some Office users have noticed Teams icons prominently appearing on their ribbons, like this one on the Outlook Calendar ribbon.
or this with Meet Now video conferencing included as well.
Or on the Home tab for emails there’s “Share to Teams”.
Microsoft justifies this as ‘helping’ customers using Teams but there’s more than a bit of self-interest. The main purpose is another promotion for their cloud services.
Redmond has done this before. OneNote and OneDrive have both intruded into customers screens whether they use it or not.
Remove a button from the Office ribbon
Deleting any button from the Office ribbon is quite easy. There’s no downside and can be restored at any time. Microsoft is taking advantage of customers reluctance even fear of changing the ribbon.
Right-click on the ribbon and choose ‘Customize the Ribbon’.
That will open File | Options | Customize Ribbon with the current ribbon selected. In this example that’s Home (Calendar) ribbon.
Select ‘Teams Meeting’ then Remove.
That’s it! Simple as that. A non-Teams ribbon that suits you, not Microsoft.
Of course, you can return to Customize Ribbon and restore the Teams button at any time.
Moving a ribbon button
Maybe you don’t mind the Teams button, just it’s self-promoting prominent location?
Go back to Customize Ribbon select the element you want to move (‘Teams Meeting’) then the up/down button to move it around that ribbon.
We’ve moved the Teams button to the bottom (meaning right) of the ribbon.
Now the Teams button is less obvious on the extreme right of the calendar ribbon.
Other buttons to banish!
Some other Microsoft promoting buttons you might like to remove:
From the Word | Review menu and the ‘CV Assistant’ connection to LinkedIn and Linked Notes to OneNote.
Linked Notes to OneNote also appears in the PowerPoint Review tab.
Any Office ribbon button or section can be moved or removed. Even entire ribbon tabs can be hidden. The most obvious candidate for tab removal is Draw which appears even if you computer has no Drawing capability. On the Customize Ribbon window uncheck ‘Draw’.
Wish List …
Why doesn’t Microsoft have an option to enable/disable all these external integrations?
Ideally there’d be overall options for OneNote, OneDrive, Teams and other related parts of Office. When enabled, the related buttons and menus appear. If disabled all those choices go away.
It’s a good and sensible idea from a customers point of view but it doesn’t suit Microsoft’s efforts to cross-promote parts of Office. Corporate self-interest has higher priority than customers convenience.
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