Disable MS Office autoupdate completely in MacOS

Dear serpent89

Good day! Thank you for posting in Microsoft Community. We are happy to help you.

Based on your description, it seems that you want to know how to turn off AutoUpdate notifications in Office for Mac.

If my understanding is correct, please try the following steps to check the result:

1)if you mean that the Autoupdate notification always says you to update, in this scenario, you can use Help > Check for Updates to launch AutoUpdate and change the setting from Automatic to Manual.

2) If you have selected Manually update Office, but it will reminder you turn on auto update feature.

If so, I suggest you try the following steps to turn off the notification:

• Click the Apple icon.

• Select System Preferences>select Notifications.

• Select Microsoft AU Daemon>uncheck all the options.

We’re looking forward to your reply and will continue to help you all the time!  If there are any misunderstanding or unclear, you can post back in your free time.

Your understanding and patience will be highly appreciated. I hope that you are keeping safe and well!

Sincerely,

Stacey | Microsoft Community Moderator

I'm not sure what you mean by changing from automatic to manual setting. Here is the screenshot of the MS autoupdate, and I am currently unable to find the setting at all.

When I go to preference (or command + ,), all I still get is the window below.

Would you care to enlighten me to find where the 'settings' is?

Dear serpent89

Thank you for your quick response and we also appreciate you spent your precious time doing the tests and providing the detailed description and screenshot to us.

For the manual setting, you can open up an MS Office application like Word, and then go to Help and Check for Updates to launch AutoUpdate and change the setting from Automatic to Manual as the screenshot below:

If you still need any further assistance, please kindly post back anytime, we'll continue to help you all the time.

Sincerely,

Stacey | Microsoft Community Moderator

I appreciate your responsiveness. I have opened the MS Autoupdate as you mentioned, but I have still seeing the same thing that I am seeing. The Autoupdate that you posted as screenshot was like 2012. After Office 365, Microsoft changed the Autoupdate window as mine for me, which I am unable to find the settings anymore. If you know any terminal commands to stop this, please let me know.

Dear serpent89

Thank you for your quickly response again.

We did a test again on the new version of office 365 on Mac. In the new version of Office 365 on Mac, click Help and Check for Updates to launch AutoUpdate, in the Preferences tab, if you check the box Automatically download and install, the autoupdate settings will become automatically

You can set it to manually via uncheck the box, and it will pops up a message saying that if you want to turn off the automatic updates, if you click Turn off, the settings will change from Automatic to Manual

Sorry for the incorrect screenshot we provided in above reply since the update of the Mac. If you need any further assistance, please kindly posyt back anytime.

Really appreciate your patience and understanding again.

Sincerely,

Stacey | Microsoft Community Moderator

As you can see from my previous reply, I have already unchecked it. However, it still pops-up whenever it wants to. I sure there is a time component within the program. This is very frustrating, and if you simply google "MS office autoupdate disable mac" you will find many articles going far as changing variable values in .plist file or completely disabling the Autoupdate from accessing the internet using either host file or simply firewall.

The problem with latter part is when I do want to update the program, and I do want to keep it updated. However, it is just not feasible to check the update prior to examination every time.

If you know any other way to simply disable it other than the ways mentioned above, I would really appreciate it.

This helped me out:

Thank you so much! I was having the same issue and this helped me get it deleted so it didn't keep popping up telling me I needed to update things. Much appreciated!

This helped me out:

https://osxdaily.com/2019/07/20/how-delete-microsoft-autoupdate-mac/

This... This is the correct answer. Micr0$0ft is misunderstanding your question, whether through failure to comprehend or deliberate obtuseness and unwillingness to recognize people's desire to remove it.

I do not accept the Microsoft Answers Platform - Terms of Use, but I can't post if I don't click the box, so this sentence serves as my express revocation of that consent.

This is the answer we need microsoft!