Q: When Microsoft Office products and Acrobat Professional are installed, Acrobat adds a PDF toolbar to Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. How do I remove this unwanted Acrobat toolbar?
A: You should be able to permanently turn it off by customizing which toolbars are displayed. However, the Acrobat toolbar seems to happily ignore that. Instead, you need to remove some troublesome configuration files.
Locate Microsoft Office folder on your computer. It's probably in the Applications folder. If you don't have the full Office, just find either Excel or Word's folder.
Use the find facility inside that folder to locate PDFMaker.dot and PDFMaker.xla files. These are the troublesome files.
Delete the .dot and .xla files from the previous step.
When Adobe Acrobat asks you to repair PDFMaker, Just say "No" to repairing it.
I think I first saw this on MacFixIt, but it's briefly described in a MacWorld article as well.
Update November 15, 2005: If you're having trouble in Tiger locating the troublesome files, in my copy of Office, they're in Office/Startup/Excel and Office/Startup/Word. "Office" is a folder in the main Microsoft Office folder in your Applications directory, i.e. in the same folder where you see the icons for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, if you have a full Microsoft Office installation. Note that applying Microsoft Office software patches often "fixes" the PDF toolbar and brings it back.
Posted by Eingang at May 10, 2005 02:41 PM
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I often have problems locating files in Tiger because the Finder's "find" feature was replaced with "Spotlight." I've updated this entry to include information on where to specifically find the troublesome files.
Posted by: Eingang at November 15, 2005 04:16 PMThanks. Been wanting to get rid of that thing!
Posted by: Andrew at August 10, 2005 09:20 PM