Disable Research in Excel

Microsoft Excel’s Research tool is a useful feature designed as a reference aid. For example, it includes translation features, dictionaries, and other lookups. But it’s also easy to open inadvertently, causing it to be in the way of your content. Fortunately, Excel offers a quick way to disable it. Let’s learn how to disable Research in Microsoft Excel.

How to Disable Research in Excel

Tired of seeing the Research tool pop open on your spreadsheets? If it isn’t a feature you ever use, this can quickly grow annoying. It can be helpful to simply disable Research so that it won’t open at all. Of course, this is a reversible change, and it’s quick to make if you decide to do so.

To get started, click on Excel’s Developer tab. You’ll find this on the ribbon, the list of menus and tabs at the top of your screen.

Hint: If you don’t have the Developer tab, click on the Excel dropdown > Preferences > Ribbon & Toolbar, and select the Developer checkbox on the right-side menu.

On the Developer tab, you’ll see several options. The one you want is on the far left: Visual Basic. Click on this option.

Excel will launch the Microsoft Visual Basic editor for your spreadsheet. Once this is open, click on the View dropdown and click Immediate Window. 

In the lower part of your screen, you’ll see the word Immediate with a white box below it. In the white box, paste the following line of code:

Application.CommandBars(“Research”).Enabled = False

Finally, press Enter and then click Save. Excel will disable the Research feature.

Need the Research feature back? Simply repeat the above steps, replacing the word False with True. The Research feature will be reactivated.

As you can see, it’s easy to disable Research in Excel to keep unwanted menus out of your way.