How to clear the “Recent Documents” list

In Excel 2007, by pressing the “Office Button”, the “File” menu is displayed. On the right side of this menu, it displays the recently opened document list.

This is a great feature. However, it may not be that useful when you are working on private files on a shared computer and you don’t want others to see the files which you have opened/edited recently.

The number of “Recent Documents” to be displayed can be changed from Advanced Option (set it to “0” for disabling this option). However, there is no option in Excel to delete this list.

To delete this list, one has to delete the registry entries of these files using Registry Editor. 

Following are the steps to delete the list of recent files.

1. Open Registry Editor - type regedit on the Start->Run menu
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\File MRU
3. Delete the listed items (all items or the items which you don’t want in “Recent files” list) on the right frame, and restart Excel 2007 to see the changes. Screenshot below show the registry editor screen listing all the recent documents of Excel

This option works in all Office applications. Simply navigate to appropriate registry entry and delete the items which you don’t want.