How to Change the Number of Recent Documents in Word for Office 365

Microsoft Word for Office 365 shows a list of your most recently accessed documents when you launch the application. This is meant to be a convenience feature that makes it easy for you to open your documents, but it may be something that you dislike, particularly if other people use your computer and you don’t want to make it so easy for them to see what you’ve been working on.

Fortunately Word gives you the ability to customize this list, including adjusting the number of documents that display there. Our tutorial below will show you where to find this setting so that you can customize it as needed.

How to Show Zero Recent Documents in Word for Office 365

The steps in this article are going to change a setting in Microsoft Word that will reduce the number of recent documents to zero. If you would still like to use the recent documents feature you can then change this number back to something else, or you can simply leave it at zero if you no longer wish to display any recent documents.

Step 1: Open Word for Office 365.

Step 2: Click the Options button at the bottom of the column on the left side of the window.

Step 3: Select the Advanced tab at the left side of the Word Options window.

Step 4: Scroll down to the Display section of the menu, then click inside the field to the right of Show this number of Recent Documents and change the value to 0.

Step 5: Click the OK button at the bottom of the window to save your changes.

If you would like to remove a single document from your list of recent documents, simply click on one of the documents in the list, then choose the Remove from list option.

Note that there is no way at the time this article was written for you to quickly clear all of the recent documents from this list.