How to remove the tell me what you want to do search box in Ms Office Excel 2016

Is it possible to remove the annoying search bar in Excel 2016?

Solution 1:

Everybody seems to love this search box, even though in a lot of windows it actually takes more space than the actual menus! Clippy's back with the vengeance! Quick (and not so quick) search of the interwebs revealed absolutely nothing. But! But there is a workaround/crutch of sorts. "Customize the ribbon", add a new tab after all the visible ones, rename it to "as many spaces as you can fit in there" and a dot, and voila - the annoying search box goes to the far right of the window. It does not disappear completely, but I'm working in Full HD right now and the box is just a few initial letters. Blends in nicely with the close/minimize/etc. Maybe you could replace the dot at the end of tab name with some completely non-printing character for even less visual clutter.

Solution 2:

In your Ribbon XML include the line:

<ribbon startFromScratch="True">

Insert this as the first line after the namespace line:

<customUI xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2006/01/customui"> 

I did this for another reason, but lo! the annoying (and dangerous) box disappeared!!!