How to clear the recent documents history in Office Viewer (2003) applications

Question

Every time I open Word Viewer (2003) and click on File menu, a list of every document it has ever opened appears, even if the original document has long gone. Where is this info stored? I've tried looking through the program files, the registry, and the .dat files, to no avail. Even tried uninstalling and reinstalling the viewer.

Answer

Word Viewer 2003

The file names history in Word Viewer 2003 is stored in the registry as a binary value. To clear the file names listing, use these steps:

• Click Start, Run and type regedit.exe and press ENTER
• Navigate to the following location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office \ 11.0 \ Wordview \ Data

• In the right-pane, delete the value named Settings
• This erases the File names MRU in Word Viewer 2003.
• Exit the Registry Editor

Excel Viewer 2003

The MRU entries for Excel Viewer 2003 are stored in this registry location:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Office \ 11.0 \ Excel Viewer \ Recent Files

Each value in the right pane (File1, File2, File3 and so forth...) stores a file name with full path. Select that corresponding value which you want to remove, and delete it.