How to Remove Adobe Acrobat Plugins for MS Office

I wish I didn’t even have to have Adobe Acrobat installed on my computer. I already have Preview for the Mac so I usually don’t need it. But every once in a while someone sends me a file with a .pdf extension that is not really a PDF but an Adobe Acrobat document. Come on Adobe, get your own extension already. These are typically Adobe Acrobat forms or Adobe Acrobat Binders. Oracle notoriously used to send out their documentation as binders that could not be opened without Acrobat Pro or Acrobat Reader installed.

Every once in a while, I notice that one of the Microsoft Apps has an Acrobat menu or ribbon button and I realize I have accidentally installed Acrobat and forgot to delete its gems that is leaves around the file system. Fortunately, cleaning up is easy. Unfortunately there’s no GUI and you have to use the Terminal.

Open Terminal and go to the Startup.localized folder:

$ cd ~/Library/Group\ Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User\ Content.localized/Startup.localized

Not that there are some spaces in the path so the backslash is used before those. Once in the directory, you can use the pwd command to verify the current working directory. You should also see three folders:

% ls
Excel Powerpoint Word

Now it is just a simple matter of deleting the files. If you are worried about deleting them you can zip them up or move them elsewhere. If you are sure you want to delete the filese, these commands will do the trick.

% rm Excel/SaveAsAdobePDF.xlam
% rm Powerpoint/SaveAsAdobePDF.ppam
% rm Word/linkCreation.dotm 

That’s it. The next time you are in Excel, Word, or Powerpoint, you should not see any Adobe Acrobat add-ins.