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How to Completely Uninstall Microsoft Office From Your Mac

Microsoft Office leaves dozens of files across ~/Library and /Library on Mac. Here's how to completely uninstall Office, including AutoUpdate and OneDrive.

9 min read

Microsoft Office is one of the messier installs on macOS. The visible apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook — are just the surface. Underneath, the installer drops files into a dozen locations, registers helpers, sets up auto-updaters, and adds login items that keep running even after you’ve trashed the apps.

If you want Office actually gone, dragging the apps to the Trash isn’t even close to enough.

What Office installs on your Mac

A typical Office for Mac install puts files in all of these places:

  • /Applications/Microsoft Word.app, Excel.app, PowerPoint.app, Outlook.app, OneNote.app
  • /Applications/OneDrive.app (often)
  • /Applications/Microsoft Teams.app (often)
  • /Applications/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app (always, in Utilities or hidden)
  • /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/
  • /Library/Application Support/com.microsoft.*
  • /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.*
  • ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/
  • ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Word/, Excel/, PowerPoint/, Outlook/, etc.
  • ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/
  • ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OfficeOneDriveSyncIntegration/
  • ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.ms/
  • ~/Library/Caches/com.microsoft.*
  • ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.*.plist
  • ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.*.plist

Office also occasionally drops fonts in /Library/Fonts/Microsoft/ and templates in ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/User Content/.

The total footprint after a full install is typically 8–15 GB. After “uninstalling” by trashing the apps, 3–6 GB of that usually stays behind.

Microsoft’s official uninstall instructions

Microsoft has a documented uninstall procedure that’s correct as far as it goes. The summary:

  1. Quit all Office apps
  2. Drag each Office .app from /Applications to Trash
  3. Manually delete files from ~/Library/Containers/, ~/Library/Group Containers/, and remove preferences

The catch: Microsoft’s instructions don’t always list every location, miss some Group Containers, and don’t address LaunchAgents or system-level helpers. Following Microsoft’s docs gets you maybe 80% of the way.

The complete manual uninstall

Here’s the more thorough version. Plan on 15–20 minutes.

Step 1: Quit everything

Close Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, Teams, and Microsoft AutoUpdate. Check the menu bar — Microsoft AutoUpdate often has a menu-bar icon. Quit it from there.

In Activity Monitor, search for “Microsoft” and kill any remaining processes — Microsoft Update Assistant, Microsoft AU Daemon, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, etc.

Step 2: Trash the visible apps

Drag from /Applications:

  • Microsoft Word.app
  • Microsoft Excel.app
  • Microsoft PowerPoint.app
  • Microsoft Outlook.app
  • Microsoft OneNote.app
  • OneDrive.app
  • Microsoft Teams.app

Don’t trash Microsoft AutoUpdate yet — there might be one more update to ignore. Or trash it; it doesn’t matter.

Step 3: Hunt the Containers and Group Containers

Open Finder, hit Cmd+Shift+G, go to ~/Library/Containers/.

Find and trash every folder starting with com.microsoft.:

  • com.microsoft.Word
  • com.microsoft.Excel
  • com.microsoft.Powerpoint
  • com.microsoft.Outlook
  • com.microsoft.onenote.mac
  • com.microsoft.teams
  • com.microsoft.OneDriveStandaloneUpdater
  • com.microsoft.OneDrive
  • com.microsoft.OneDrive-mac
  • com.microsoft.errorreporting
  • com.microsoft.netlib.shipassertprocess

These contain your local copies of Office files. Important: check whether you have any documents you care about inside Containers/com.microsoft.Word/Data/Documents/ (or similar) before trashing — Word sometimes saves there if you used “Save As” without specifying a location.

Then go to ~/Library/Group Containers/ and trash:

  • UBF8T346G9.Office
  • UBF8T346G9.OfficeOneDriveSyncIntegration
  • UBF8T346G9.ms
  • UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite

UBF8T346G9 is Microsoft’s developer team ID — that’s why everything Microsoft starts with it.

Step 4: Application Support and Caches

Trash ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/ and /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/ (admin password needed for the system one).

In ~/Library/Caches/, trash anything starting with com.microsoft..

In /Library/Caches/, trash anything starting with com.microsoft..

Step 5: Preferences

In ~/Library/Preferences/, find and trash all files starting with com.microsoft.. There can be 10–20 of these.

Step 6: LaunchAgents and helpers

The part most uninstall guides skip:

  • ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.*.plist
  • /Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.*.plist
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.*.plist
  • /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper (and similar)

Removing the system-level files needs admin. Trash them, authenticate when prompted.

Step 7: Empty Trash, restart

Empty Trash, then restart your Mac. The restart ensures any orphan helpers haven’t been respawned.

Let Sweep uninstall properlyDrag-to-trash leaves traces. Sweep’s uninstaller wipes the app, support files, prefs, caches, and helpers — all at once. Get Sweep — free for Mac →

Special considerations

OneDrive

OneDrive deserves its own paragraph because removing it has consequences:

  • Quit OneDrive first (menu bar → settings gear → Quit OneDrive)
  • The OneDrive folder in ~/OneDrive (or wherever you set it) will remain — your files are there. Decide whether to keep them.
  • After removing OneDrive, files may show as “online only” with cloud icons until you remove the cloud integration

Outlook data

If you used Outlook with a local IMAP/POP account or an Exchange profile that didn’t sync everything, your mail data is in ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/. Back this up before trashing if you want to preserve mail history.

Office documents in iCloud

If you saved documents to iCloud (which Office for Mac supports), those are in iCloud Drive, not in the Office containers. They’re safe.

License

Office uses Microsoft 365 subscription auth, which lives in your account on Microsoft’s side. Removing the apps doesn’t cancel your subscription. Sign out of Office before uninstalling if you want to free up an installation slot.

Tip: Microsoft's "Office License Removal Tool" is a separate utility you can download from Microsoft's site if you need to remove a stuck license file. Useful if you're switching between personal and work Microsoft accounts on the same Mac.

Why Office leaves so much behind

Office for Mac is sandboxed (App Store-style), which means most of its data is in ~/Library/Containers/. macOS’s “drag to trash” model handles a single container reasonably well — the issue is that Office uses many containers and Group Containers, plus system-level helpers for AutoUpdate, plus a privileged helper tool, plus LaunchAgents.

Each of those is correctly placed for what it does. The aggregate is a mess to clean up by hand.

Microsoft AutoUpdate specifically

Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) is the auto-updater for Office. It runs constantly in the background and is one of the biggest sources of “where is this CPU going” mysteries on Office-using Macs.

Even if you “uninstalled” Office by trashing the apps, MAU might still be:

  • Running in the menu bar
  • Registered as a LaunchAgent that auto-starts at login
  • Holding open a privileged helper tool

To get rid of MAU completely:

  1. Quit MAU from its menu bar icon (or Microsoft Update Assistant in Activity Monitor)
  2. Trash /Applications/Utilities/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app (sometimes it’s hidden — Cmd+Shift+G to /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/)
  3. Trash ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/
  4. Trash ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist
  5. Trash /Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist (admin needed)
  6. Trash /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper (admin needed)

After that, MAU is genuinely gone.

Doing it with Sweep

Sweep’s app uninstaller has a specific Office removal path. Select Word (or any Office app) and Sweep automatically locates:

  • All Office app bundles
  • All ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.* folders
  • All ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.* folders
  • Application Support and Caches
  • All Microsoft preferences
  • LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons
  • Microsoft AutoUpdate and its helper

It shows you the full list with sizes — typically 4–8 GB recoverable from a “trashed but not properly uninstalled” Office install — and you confirm before anything is removed.

The big advantage over the manual route is the LaunchAgent and helper-tool cleanup, which is what makes the difference between “Office is gone” and “Office is gone but its updater is still secretly running.”

Skip the manual huntSweep finds every leftover preference, cache, and support file in seconds — and only removes what you OK. Download Sweep free →

After uninstall

Some things you should verify:

  1. Activity Monitor → search for “Microsoft” or “Office”. Should be empty.
  2. System Settings → General → Login Items & Extensions. Should not see Microsoft entries.
  3. ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ and /Library/LaunchAgents/. No .plist files starting with com.microsoft..
  4. Free disk space should be measurably higher.
  5. Login should feel slightly faster.

If any Microsoft processes are still running, they’re being launched by an agent you missed. Track it down via the ProgramArguments in remaining .plist files.

Quick reference

To completely uninstall Office:

  • Quit all Office apps and AutoUpdate
  • Trash apps from /Applications
  • Clean ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.* and Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.*
  • Clean ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/ and /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/
  • Clean ~/Library/Caches/com.microsoft.* and /Library/Caches/com.microsoft.*
  • Clean ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.*
  • Clean LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons matching com.microsoft.*
  • Empty Trash, restart

Or use Sweep and click Uninstall on Word — it’ll find the rest.

Office is one of those installs where a tool genuinely earns its keep. Manual works, but it takes a while and it’s easy to miss the helper tools.

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