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Is it possible to remove the annoying search bar in Excel 2016?

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    What research have you done? What have you tried? – CharlieRB Jan 27 '16 at 13:37
  • @CharlieRB I've spent about 20 minutes on google and have been through all the options in the menu and Ribbon. Nothing's there. Found [one post on MSDN saying it's impossible to turn that off](https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/exchange/en-US/46c658b0-a10a-4aca-af10-438393b073ca/remove-tell-me-what-you-want-to-do-search-box-from-ms-office-16-ribbon?forum=Office2016ITPro) but it's just a guess. –  Jan 28 '16 at 08:13
  • Also I found the [Office 2016 Help Files: Office Fluent User Interface Control Identifiers](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=50745) but I am unsure what that Control's name is... –  Jan 28 '16 at 08:28

2 Answers2

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Everybody seems to love this search box, even though in a lot of windows it actually takes more space than the actual menus! Clippy's back with the vengeance! Quick (and not so quick) search of the interwebs revealed absolutely nothing. But! But there is a workaround/crutch of sorts. "Customize the ribbon", add a new tab after all the visible ones, rename it to "as many spaces as you can fit in there" and a dot, and voila - the annoying search box goes to the far right of the window. It does not disappear completely, but I'm working in Full HD right now and the box is just a few initial letters. Blends in nicely with the close/minimize/etc. Maybe you could replace the dot at the end of tab name with some completely non-printing character for even less visual clutter.

Jakub Kaczyński
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In your Ribbon XML include the line:

<ribbon startFromScratch="True">

Insert this as the first line after the namespace line:

<customUI xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/01/customui">

I did this for another reason, but lo! the annoying (and dangerous) box disappeared!!!

Worthwelle
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Niall Mandal
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  • Is this related to editing the ribbon of a single document as described [here](https://bettersolutions.com/vba/ribbon/document-level-notepad.htm)? Or is there a way to edit a ribbon file that applies to all files? – jous Feb 05 '20 at 08:40