How to Skip the Start Screen When Opening Excel 2013

While everyone that uses Microsoft Excel has their own tendencies and preferences, it is common among many of these users to choose a blank workbook when starting a new project. The templates available on the Start screen can improve specific tasks, but you may find that you aren’t personally using them very often.

Therefore, the lack of utility generated by Excel 2013’s Start screen might leave you looking for a way to remove it. Our guide below will direct you to the location of this setting so that you can disable and allow Excel to open directly to a blank workbook.

Bypass the Excel 2013 Start Screen on Launch

The steps below will modify the settings for your Excel 2013 installation so that Excel will open to a new, blank workbook whenever you launch the program. This removes the step where you had previously been able to choose from a selection of templates.

Step 1: Launch Excel 2013.

Step 2: Click the File tab at the top-left corner of the window.

click the file tab

Step 3: Click Options at the bottom of the column on the left side of the window. This launches the Excel Options window.

click the options button

Step 4: Click the General tab at the top of the column on the left side of the Excel Options window.

click the general tab

Step 5: Scroll to the bottom of this menu, then click the box to the left of Show the Start screen when this application starts to remove the check mark. You can then click the OK button at the bottom of the window to save your changes and close the Excel Options window.

disable start screen in excel 2013

If you now choose to close Excel 2013 and re-launch it, you will open to a blank workbook instead.

Now that you know how to skip the start screen when opening Excel 2013, you can start editing your spreadsheets more quickly.

Do you have difficulty printing multi-page spreadsheets in Excel? One setting that can help to improve readability is to print titles at the top of every page. This makes it much easier for your readers to follow the data in your cells, and can help to minimize mistakes caused by the misidentification of columns.

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