Disable Office "UPDATES AVAILABLE" notification

Question

I'm using Office Pro Plus 2016 on Windows 10 Pro 64-bit and having an annoying problem.

I have turned off Windows Update and Office Updates. This is working fine, I think. But I'm getting this annoying notification in Office:

UPDATES AVAILABLE Updates for Office are ready to be installed, but first we need to close some apps.

Coming accross to this notification every time I launch an Office product is starting to get to me. Isn't there a way to get rid of this?

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Turned Windows Update off using the methods described in How to turn off Windows Update in Windows 10.

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Answer 1

You are using the click-to-run version of Office 2016. Thus, the Office updates are not controlled by Windows Update.

When automatic updates are enabled for Office clcik-to-run version, in most cases updates are applied automatically in the background without any user input. However, updates can't be applied if an Office program is open. If an Office program is open, other attempts are made to apply the updates at a later time. If, after several days, updates haven't been applied, only then will users see a notification that an update to Office is available.

To disable the update notification, we can try the following registry key settings:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate
Value Name: hideupdatenotifications
Value Type: REG_DWORD
Value Data: 1 

You can also create the hideupdatenotifications value with group policy setting to disable it:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\policies\microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate

Answer 2

I got office 2019 and I did the same as Jamie did but in my case, the value had a different name.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Updates Value: UpdatesBlockedTime

The above key contains this string: 13192893363011, I blanked the value as Jamie did and now it doesn't show me the updates pop up.

Note: works on Office 2016 as well

Answer 3

I tried handling this through GPO myself. The hideupdatenotifications registry key/Group Policy Object does not handle this particular update banner. That reg key/GPO disables notifications of updates in the system tray, but not within applications themselves. For the record, that banner only shows up if downloads have tried to install in the background for 6 days, but were not able to. In other words, if a user leaves an Office app open, Office cannot update...if that goes on for 6 days after updates were downloaded in the background, you'll see that banner in any newly opened Office app.

See here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/end-user-update-notifications-for-office-365-proplus

Answer 4

In my case, also click-to-run Office 2016, I had to edit a registry key to stop the banner from coming up on startup.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\ClickToRun\Updates
Value: UpdatesReadyToApply

The above key contained an update string that was previously downloaded and ready to install. I blanked the value and this stopped the banner from coming up.

I left the key 'UpdatesReadyToApply' in place, just removed its contents.