How to stop Office 2013 welcome to your new office screen

Removing Microsoft Office 2013 welcoming screen with Office 2013 administrative template files.

I have been deploying Office 2013 to many clients now-a-days and one of them started to complain about the Office welcoming screen that shows up when you first launch one of Office’s products.

I wanted to take care of this in one shot, so I decided to use a group policy to implement the command to disable the welcome screen that launches during the first initial start of a Office application.

Okay, so this group policy will be targeting the ‘User’ configuration policy, so you may need to enable ‘loopback processing‘. Due to Windows servers not having the Office 2013 administrative templates installed, you will need to download them here. Once you download the zip file and extract the files to a location you can find them you will then need to copy all the *.admx files into the %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions location.

After that is completed you will then have to copy all the *.adml files to the following location %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\en-US (or place the file into your own locale folder if your not English)

Here is the path to create the GPO within your Group Policy Management Editor:

User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Policy definitions > Microsoft Office 2013 > First Run

Make sure to Enable the following two policies;

• Disable First Run Movie
• Disable Office First Run on application boot