14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this month, a number of Windows 10 users started noticing that Microsoft Office PWAs were silently installed on their devices, all without their consent.
These Office apps, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, launched in Microsoft Edge and were pinned to the Start menu.
Needless to say, while users could manually uninstall all PWAs installed without authorization, many criticized the company for forcing Office on them, especially because the whole blunder reportedly occurred on devices where the desktop productivity suite wasn’t installed.
This explains why I haven’t received these PWAs on my devices, as I do have an Office 365 subscription and all Office apps are already installed on the device.
Rollout suspended
And according to a report from Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley, Office apps installed silently on Windows 10 devices and then pinned to the Start menu is only partly a bug, as Microsoft actually intended to the whole thing. However, no specifics are available right as to why Microsoft wanted to install Office PWAs on Windows 10 devices in the first place.
Oddly enough, it looks like this isn’t necessarily the approach that Microsoft wanted to use, so the public backlash that we covered not a long time ago convinced the software giant that it might be better to look into other ways to bring the Office PWAs on Windows 10 devices.
So right now, the rollout has been suspended, which means that for the time being, no other users should end up with the Office PWAs forced on their devices running Windows 10.
Of course, if the Office PWAs have already been installed and you don’t actually need them, the easiest way to get rid of everything is to head over to the Control Panel where you can find a list of all installed applications.