SOLVED: How to Set Word / Excel 2013 To Open Directly To A New Blank Page / Sheet

If you are annoyed by the initial page in Word / Excel / PowerPoint / Publishers 2013 that provides links to you most recent 20 documents and displays a page of templates to work from, you will be pleased to find it is easy to fix.

If you want to Excel to launch to a new worksheet or Word or open to a blank page in Office 2013, just:

1. Click FILE > OPTIONS
2. Click the  GENERAL menu
3. UN-select SHOW THE START SCREEN WHEN THIS APPLICATION STARTS

In the beta’s of Office 2013 you could set the registry entry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\General\DisableBootToOfficeStart

REG_DWORD = 1

However, in the release this Key does not exist.  I assume if you create it that it will suppress the Start Screen, but I have not tested it to validate this claim.