Can not disable "Use Office connected experiences" pop-up when opening Word (macintosh)

Question

After the recent Office update, I am *continually* bothered by a pop-up window showing "Use Office connected experiences" with a button "Privacy Preferences" to presumably enable or disable this feature (and therefore remove this very annoying pop-up).

There is no setting in Privacy Preferences that is enabled already and I do not see an option to choose not to use these "connected experiences" to remove this pop-up appearing.

To make matter worse, inside some Word documents, when clicking on a piece of text, another pop-up appears related to these connected experiences too. I do not want to use these connected experience features.

(Please do not refer me to looking at the Privacy Preferences in the Word or other Office Mac applications. That is not helpful. I have also looked at my settings on Microsoft 365 and see nothing to disable these pop-ups when using the local application on macOS.)

Answer 1

[Re-posting my comment from a related forum]:

I, too, spent hours with Microsoft Support. The only thing that worked was fully uninstalling the Office for Mac app (including the August 15, 2023 update) and then reinstalling Office for Mac by way of the prior, July 11, 2023 update, which made the relentless pop-up go away.

Scroll down to the July 11 Office Suite (version 16.75) here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-for-mac

These pitbull-like pop-ups have to be a bug. As much as Microsoft may want your data, firebombing paying customers with non-stop reminders contrary to their own privacy preferences can't be the best way to do it, can it?

The level-2 support agent I chatted with today said the more people complain, the more likely engineers will fix it in the next update.

Answer 2

I spend considerable time with 2 levels of Microsoft support and it is a bug in the current version of Word (not the other Office apps).

Answer 3

i agree. this is incredibly annoying - both time-consuming and aggressive. the only choice available appears to be turning on the connectivity features. the program pesters the user until they turn on connected experiences. i, too would like to know how to complain to microsoft. how do i do this?

Answer 4

Thanks, but this does not work for me. I am using Office 365 for Mac.

When I choose "help" from the menu bar, I get this:

When I select the closest option to what you suggest, "Contact Support", I get this:

The entire point is that I don't want to use Office "connected experiences" so I don't want to turn them on to complain about having to turn them on. (In fact, I cannot use "help" at all anymore because anything under that menu requires turning on connected experiences. Another source of frustration.)

Is there any other option for complaining to MS about this?