Well well, if it isn’t that pesky Microsoft Office, screwing things up again.
Now if you ask me, my Documents folder should be for… well… documents. Not settings and user preferences, that belongs in ~/Library, for good reason.
If you want to hide the “Microsoft User Data” folder, you’re going to need the Developer Tools, and you can easily obtain them by inserting your OS X disk into your Mac, and just installing them
If you are unsure if you have them or not, open a Terminal and type
cd /Developer/Tools
If you get an “Error: No such file or directory.” then you’ll need to install them off the disk.
Once you’re sure you have the developer tools, then open Terminal, and type the following command.
/Developer/Tools/./SetFile -a V "/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Documents/Microsoft User Data"
After that you might need to restart Finder for the effect to show. You can do this one of two ways… One way would be to restart your Mac, but we all know that’s not ideal, so back to Terminal we go… If you havn’t already noticed, terminal is one of the most powerful tools you have available to you in OS X. Anyhow, go to Terminal and type:
killall Finder
This command will kill any processes for Finder, and Finder will automatically restart itself.
After that, head to your documents folder/stack and you should see the changes.
It has also come to my attention that if you’re using a Documents stack, that you may need to drag an icon in/out of the stack for that to refresh as well, as it’s handled by Dock.app and not Finder.app
Enjoy your now clean documents folder.
Anonymous on January 7th, 2010 at 5:27 AM says:
I tryed all of this. Why is this neccessary tho?
It seems like a lot of effort and a waste of 2.7GB (or whatever it was) of space, just to move the ‘microsoft user data’ folder out of my documents.
Why such a hassle??
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Facebook User on January 7th, 2010 at 8:13 AM says:
You’re not wasting any amount of data, the Microsoft Office folder itself (with all the apps) are stored in the “Applications” folder. The User Data folder in question only stores templates and other files the user never actually has to look at or see ever.
Call me (and many others out there) a perfectionist, or neat-freak, but when I see my “Documents” folder, I’d like it to be filled w/ my actual documents, not some folder that contains random user data from MS Office.
Moving the folder doesn’t work, as the next time you launch any Office program, it puts the folder back.
This guide shows you how to hide just that folder, letting Office still access it, but without the user having to ever see it.
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Craig Dyer on January 10th, 2010 at 10:23 AM says:
Thank you, that worked perfectly.
It takes a while but for those who want things looking perfect this is a great method!
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Facebook User Reply:
January 10th, 2010 at 4:19 PM
@Craig Dyer, Yeah, it’s a bit of a pain, but it sticks after updates and everything, so its a one-time fix that works very very well.
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Anonymous on June 23rd, 2010 at 7:38 PM says:
How would I undo this?
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