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- Microsoft quietly started putting weird ads for Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, and Word on the Start menu of Windows 10 PCs without giving users advance notice.
- These apps are actually links that open the Microsoft Edge browser, but if you don’t know, you may think you’ve been hacked.
- Fortunately, the apps are very easy to remove from your Windows 10 PC.
Windows 10, for all its flaws, is one of the most stable and usable versions of the operating system that Microsoft has ever created. However, some of those flaws are far more egregious than others, like the ads the company posts for its own products in the Start menu. As seen by Born’s Tech and Windows World (via gHacks), Windows 10 users have started to see entries for Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, and Word in the Start menu of their Windows 10 version 2004 computers, even though they have never manually installed any of those programs.
How gHacks explains, there are a number of issues at stake here. First of all, Microsoft never announced that it would place these ads on the Start menu. Despite how advanced malware has become in recent years, Windows 10 users would be forgiven for assuming that these mysterious and unwanted apps are malicious in nature. Unfortunately, without an official explanation from Microsoft, you need to do some research to see if the apps are safe.
After analyzing each of the applications, gHacks discovered that the publisher is just the name of the application (“Outlook”, “Word”, etc.), rather than Microsoft Corporation. Each of the applications appears as version 1.0 with the same installation date and no size information. And it turns out that they are all actually web shortcuts for Edge.
If you go to Control Panel> Programs> Programs and Features, you should see all the apps on that list. If you try to uninstall them, you will receive a message asking if you want to remove the application from Microsoft Edge. If you open the Edge browser and type “edge: // apps”, you should see them installed there too.
Ads are essentially shortcuts to Office Web Apps that open the app in an Edge window. They are not malicious and are quite easy to remove. But they are still invasive, annoying, and pointless.
The biggest problem here is that there have been a lot more clever and subtle tricks than this in recent memory. Whether it’s a PC or a smartphone, someone is trying to hack into it, and we’ve been trained to be especially wary of emails, apps, text messages, and calls that we don’t recognize. The fact that Microsoft sneakily installs a bunch of apps on Windows 10 without at least explicitly explaining what was happening and why is incredibly silly and will undoubtedly make a bunch of unaware users freak out, convinced that they’ve been hacked.
Jacob began covering video games and technology in college as a hobby, but quickly realized that this was what he wanted to do for a living. He currently resides in New York writing for BGR. His previously published work can be found on TechHive, VentureBeat, and Game Rant.
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