How to disable the Microsoft Office Upload Center

If you install a recent copy of Microsoft Office on your Windows PC, you may notice that something that the Microsoft Office Upload Center gets installed with that copy.

You may notice it in the system tray area of the operating system as it displays its own icon there. The Upload Center may also display there after you set up OneDrive on a Windows 10 machine (maybe on older versions as well but I did not test that).

First question that may come to your mind is why it is there and what it is used for.

Microsoft offers the following description:

"Microsoft Office Upload Center now gives you a way to see the state of files you're uploading to a server, in one location. When you upload a file to a web server, Microsoft first saves that file locally to the Office Document Cache before it starts the upload, which means that you can save changes and immediately continue working even when you are offline or have a bad network connection. The Microsoft Office Upload Center lets you keep track of how uploads are progressing, and whether any files need your attention."

Basically, it is a software used to control Office documents that you work on that get uploaded to a server. This is mostly useful in scenarios where you work with remote documents. If you do, you may not want to disable the Upload Center but if you use Office locally only, there is no reason to keep the Office Upload Center around.

You may use the Upload Center to manage Microsoft Office file uploads to web servers (e.g. OneDrive).

How to disable the Microsoft Office Upload Center

You may notice that the Upload Center can't be shut down easily. A right-click on the Upload Center icon does not display options to exit the program, and the program interface offers no options to shut it down as well.

The only option that Microsoft provides is to hide the icon in the Windows notification area. This is not the same as terminating the application or making sure it is not run in first place though.

Click on Settings and uncheck "Display icon in notification area" to hide it. If you prefer to disable it completely, read on.

The easiest way to disable the Upload Center on a Windows machine seems limited to Windows 10 only. I cannot say for sure, so let me know in the comments if the option is also available on Windows 8.1 or Windows 7.

Right-click on the OneDrive icon in the System Tray area, or start OneDrive. Select Settings and swithc to the Office tab.

Microsoft OneDriver

You disable the Upload Center if you uncheck "Use Office 2016 to sync Office files that I open". A restart should complete the process and Office Upload Center should not run anymore on the system.

Other solutions

Here is a quick list of other suggestions:

1. Open HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curre ntVersion\Run in the Registry Editor and delete the OfficeSyncProcess there.
2. Open the Windows Task Scheduler, and disable the Microsoft Office [version] Sync Maintenance for [username] task.
3. Rename the file C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office15\msosync.exe. This may throw errors however.

Check out this discussion on Superuser for additional tips on dealing with the Upload Center.