I could have also typed in “/Users/taylor/Library/Preferences” but, well, that’s more work, so the shortcut is a good thing. In this and other cases, the tilde symbol (“~”) is a keyboard shortcut for your home directory. Note the keyboard shortcut too, it’ll come in handy: Shift-Cmd-G.

Instead, you’ll become friends with “Go to Folder…” off the “Go” menu in the Finder: You can theoretically stop here if you want and don’t care about configuration and preference files, license data files, etc.ĭon’t want that, want to go through to the bitter end, removing every possible trace of the applications? OOooookkkaaayyyyy….įor the rest of the process, you’re going to be delving into directories that are usually hidden from you, so you won’t be able to browse to them using the Finder and your usual approach to navigating Mac OS X. The first step is the most obvious and probably the single biggest step towards reclaiming the disk space that the app suite has consumed: removing the Microsoft Office 2011 folder from your Applications folder: Fortunately, you don’t have to unravel their confusing instructions, I can show you how to do it instead. I figured out how to remove it thanks to a somewhat confusing Microsoft Tech Note ingeniously titled How to Completely Remove Office for Mac. Still, an application like Microsoft Office does install a lot of stuff in a staggering number of different locations on your computer. On the Mac, at least, it’s not quite as bad, muchly because Apple doesn’t have the cursed registry file that is the bane of all Windows and PC administrators. You want to really see the bleeding edge of this, go do a search for “remove norton antivirus” and read about the years of frustration people have had with that particular Byzantine removal process. Whether you’re on a Mac or PC, complicated applications can be so deeply embedded in your computer and operating system that it can be well-nigh impossible to fully and completely remove it. Welcome to the sticky world of big software installation on your computer.

Microsoft office uninstall mac