Remove Add-Ins from Microsoft products

Report · Jan 09, 2025

I understand this question probably does not belong in the photoshop community.

Who know which catagory it goes in? I picked the photoshop community because it has a lot of followers.

I use a few adobe products through creative cloud. And adobe seems happy to install their bloatware all over my computer and the apps on my computer.

My MS Office programs all have adobe bloatware.

I will picke Excel as an example. Adobe installs an "acrobat" menu on the ribbon in Excel. Never need it. No need to have it there.

It is simple to remove 1 time.
File => Options => Add-ins => Manage - Com Add-ins => Go = > Uncheck - Acrobat PDFMaker Office COM Addin

I have done the above 100 times... and as soon as some adobe update runs... it is turned back on.

What a complete rude thing to do. How do I get these adobe Add-ins permentantly turned off.

Report · Jan 10, 2025

Since Photoshop doesn't install these types of items, I'm moving this over to the Acrobat forums

Report · Jan 28, 2025

Hello,

I hope you're doing well, and we apologize for the delayed response and the trouble.

Please see these articles on removing the add-ins from the office apps: https://adobe.ly/4aDarSX

https://adobe.ly/4jrLhLn

https://adobe.ly/4ayqTE0

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Anand Sri.

Report · Jul 04, 2025

What an unhelpful reply; none of your anwers give any help on how to permanently remove the crap Adobe installs. I have zero need PDFMaker. Today I opened Outlook and now there is a Share PDF button in my message replies. I can almost understand the logic of forcing PDFMaker on people, but adding a Share as a link to my outlook messages, that has nothing to do with creating PDFs.

And you can't just remove the com add-in, no Adobe makes it unremovable because it could be used by other fictitious users of my laptop.

This thread has some better solutions:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-acrobat-online-discussions/disable-document-cloud-outlook-add-i...
Solutions inclued renaming the adobe COM folders so the Add-ins can't load. The reddit thread linked in the above someone has written a batch file that you can run after every update of Acrobat.

There is another solution to use Windows Polices to block the add-ins from loading. This is the solution I have chosen, but it requires downloading the Office admx files, using the Group Policy Editor and changing things. You also need to have admin access on your computer.

Report · Jul 04, 2025

Hi George,

Very good post.

Adobe does such a long list of very @55hole things. That tells you that there are fundamentally bad people running this company.

They systematically do this. Adobe was once a good company with good to great products.

Now all their software is getting dated. Their desire to be creative and create actually good products is gone.

Photoshop for example. The user interface was good 20+ years ago. Today it is an old and dated user interface. They are getting lazy and complacent... and using these scammy tricks to try to get users. If they truly had great products they would not need these scammy tricks. People would simply want their stuff.

Now they have a reputation for being bad scam artists... they will die like so many companies that get this attitude.