EnableDisable for Office for Windows

Office add-ins range from indispensable to strictly optional, but they can pile up, which sometimes slows down your Office apps. Of course, minutes after you disable one, you'll need it (we exaggerate, but not much). If add-ons cramp your style when you open Word, Excel, or other Office tools, take a look at EnableDisable for Office. This standalone freeware lets you enable or disable Office add-ons as needed. It works with all versions of Office and Windows 2000 to 7, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

EnableDisable's simple interface has tabs for each Office application: Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. Each lists all the add-ins installed for each program by Load On type (Demand or Startup), Name and Description. Check boxes enable or disable each add-on. To enable or disable an add-in, you must to close the Office app in question, make your choice in EnableDisable, and reopen the app. We simply closed all our Office apps before we opened EnableDisable. We made our choices. Whenever we enabled or disabled an add-in, EnableDisable displayed the action in a message in the window's bottom frame. Outlook had the most add-ins, so we disabled all except our antivirus add-in and restarted Outlook. Outlook really did seem to load faster, so we enabled them all in EnableDisable again and reopened Outlook. Although the difference was slight, Outlook obviously loaded a bit more quickly. We checked Outlook's options, and all our add-ins were listed as either inactive or disabled. When we checked again after re-enabling our add-ins, all showed active in Outlook's options. Apart from a Help menu and a link to more add-ins on the toolbar, that's all there is to this EnableDisable for Office.

EnableDisable for Office will be most useful to those users whose apps are encrusted with add-ins they have to have but don't always need. Instead of having to click through to each program's options sheet, all you have to do is make your choices in this simple but useful tool. The performance boost will be most noticeable in older, slower machines or in resource-intensive operations, but anyone who uses Office should check it out.