How to uninstall Microsoft AutoUpdate on macOS?

Question

I deleted the Office suite from my MacBook, but I receive notifications from Microsoft AutoUpdate that there are software updates. How can it be if I deleted Office? How to uninstall Microsoft AutoUpdate?

Answer 1

While Microsoft's guide for uninstalling Office says to remove files from your user Library, Microsoft AutoUpdate is actually located in the system Library, in /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0. The simplest way to uninstall the app if it's open is to secondary click the icon in the dock, select Options > Show in Finder, Go > Enclosing Folder and delete the MAU2.0 folder.

Answer 2

On macOS Mojave 10.14.1, this is what I found:

Microsoft Auto Update had 19 files on macOS in multiple directories, after I'd already removed it from ~/Library/Containers. You should remove those folders to completely remove the application and all it's traces. Some of the directories have spaces in their names, make sure to type those spaces with a leading backslash, if you use rm -Rf to remove those!

In your System Library:

/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app

In your User-Library:

~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate.fba.plist
~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft AU Daemon
~/Library/Saved Application State/com.microsoft.autoupdate2.savedState

You will also find temporary files, I had them in four different locations, but your mac will clean those up eventually. I found some in the system- and user-caches, as well as in /private/var/folders, if you really want all traces gone, you'll have to track those down as well.

Answer 3

Follow the Manual Steps here

Make sure to check:

• ~/Library/Preferences/
• ~/Library/Application Support/
• ~/Library/Caches/
• /Library/Preferences/
• /Library/Application Support/
• /Library/Caches/

There might be other directories but you get the point, the guide explains it fairly well.

Hope this helps!

Answer 4

Check under /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools, all kinds of skeletons lurk there from applications that had been installed at some point. I found the following executables in this folder related to MS-Office:

com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper
com.microsoft.office.licensing.helper
com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.helper

Answer 5

Simplest would be to use the Uninstall tool - MS KB Troubleshoot Office 2011 for Mac issues by completely uninstalling before you reinstall

Answer 6

This is an old question, but one solution past manually doing rem moving items is to download and install the app AppCleaner and just drag Microsoft AutoUpdate on it and let it figure out what files to remove to completely purge it from your system.

Each version of Microsoft Office might be different, but app cleaning apps like AppCleaner work great.

Answer 7

You can change the update installation procedure from the Office app. Open any Office application (e.g. Microsoft Word)

• Open AutoUpdate window through the Help -> Check for Updates.
• Then select Manually Check radio button.

I think it will resolve your problem. Microsoft AutoUpdate process won't be executed.