How to Disable the PDFMaker Toolbar in Office 2003

If you use Microsoft Office 2003 or newer, you may already be aware of the presence of the PDFMaker toolbar. If you’re at all like me, you’ve been plagued by this toolbar’s persistence in displaying itself proudly on the screen.

This little toolbar makes itself most apparent in Outlook 2003, attaching itself to the main Outlook window as well as each and every new mail message you open. Here are a few ways to disable this thing once and for all.

Uninstall

The best way to insure that this toolbar will not reappear is to not install it in the first place. However, you’re probably reading this article because you’ve already installed it and you just want to get rid of it.

To remedy this, simply run your Acrobat install process again. When asked to Modify, Repair, or Remove, choose Modify.

In the next window, click the plus sign next to Create Adobe PDF to expand the options. Make sure Acrobat PDFMaker is unselected from being installed as shown below.

Continue with the repair install and the PDFMaker will be removed from your system.

The drawback to this method is that you may not have access to the original Acrobat install file/CD. This is where the next option comes in handy.

Create a New Message

Here’s a tidbit of info that isn’t that well-known. The PDFMaker Toolbar saves it’s location whenever you create a new message (or open an existing one). So, once you move or disable the toolbar (View > Toolbars > PDFMaker), immediately create a new mail message or open one in your Inbox. After doing this, you can exit and re-open Outlook and the PDFMaker will remember its new position.

This works the same for the rest of the Office suite as well. For example, in Excel, disable the PDFMaker toolbar then create a new workbook. You can then restart the program and the toolbar retains the changes.

Unregister the DLL

You may have found that the file, PDFMOutlook.dll, is the culprit for many of your longstanding woes with the toolbar. A common way to eliminate the toolbar is to unregister the dll. This can be done by going to Start > Run and typing the following:

regsvr32 /u “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat 7.0\PDFMaker\Mail\Outlook\PDFMOutlook.dll”

While this indeed does get rid of the toolbar, it’s not a recommended method as it basically just keeps the file from being loaded when you start Outlook. If you’ve done this already, I’ll recommend that you re-register the dll file and then follow one of the above methods.

To re-register the file, simply go to Start > Run and type the following:

regsvr32 “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat 7.0\PDFMaker\Mail\Outlook\PDFMOutlook.dll”