How To Clear MSWord 2007 Recent Documents List

A buddy of mine just asked me this question today. "Francis, how do i clear my Microsoft word 2007 recent list so people don't see documents I've been working on."

I said to myself, hmmmmm, thats a pretty good question. So I did some googling and came up with some solutions that I want to share with you guys.

FIRST SOLUTION
This one is kinda easy and pretty straight to the point. Actually did work for me like magic. It can be pulled of right in MS Word 2007.
1- Click “Office Button” at the left top;
2- Click “Word Options”;
3- Click “Advanced” tab;
4- Scroll down to “Display” portion;
5- Set the value for “Show this number of Recent Documents” to “0″ (ZERO).
That’s it.

SECOND SOLUTION
This one is more advanced and for my tech guys. It's got to do with editing/modifying your registry a little bit.
Make sure to back up the registry before you modify it. Make sure that you know how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up, restore, and modify the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: 256986 - Description of the Microsoft Windows registry

To clear the Recent Documents list in your Word 2007:

1. Open regedit (yes, you have to use the registry) by clicking START | RUN | and typing “regedit” then clicking “OK”
2. In regedit, navigate to the following location: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\File MRU
3. Delete some or all of the entries to clear out what you need cleared out.
4. Close regedit

That’s it, you’re done.

To disable Recent Documents history altogether:

1. Go to Start -> Run -> type regedit and enter
2. Browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Microsoft\ Windows\ CurrentVersion\ Policies\ Explorer
3. Create a DWORD value with the key NoRecentDocsHistory and set the value to 1

That’s it, you’re done!