Accidental Office 365 Uninstall: A Storage Space Recovery Saga with a Surprisingly Okay Ending.

Attempting to Delete Skype and Deleted MS Office Suite (Office 365) as Well.

Microsoft announced the Skype will be retiring in May of 2025. Full disclosure: I worked for Microsoft for two years deploying datacenter hardware to support Lync and Skype.

• Microsoft Announcement: What You Need to Know

My four-year-old Dell XPS has travelled far and wide on my consulting adventures. The XPS is configured with an i5-1135G7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Two weeks ago I started noticing a slow down when moving files. After moving most of my documents and all of my pictures to an external drive - I was still in the RED due to installed applications.

Dell XPS System Storage

Uninstalling the Other Stuff

Standard practice is to start a dust bunny hunt - looking for files to clean up - temporary files, old installer files, as well as a few unusual things like thumbnails from pictures. I was still in the red and started looking at applications to uninstall. Adobe Creative Studio, Visual Studio, MSFT Project and MSFT Visio were recent additions - but none of them showed their file size. When I saw the Skype announcement I though I had found a solid target.

Oops - That Did Not Work as Expected

Navigated to Installed Apps, scrolled down to Skype, clicked on the three-dot menu on the right and attempted to unistall.

[Insert mushroom cloud graphic here.]

The entire MS Office Suite uninstalled! There was a moment where I sat staring at the screen mubling something along the lines of "You've Been Upgraded!"

At least I recovered some space on my drive. (Consultants will always look for a win, even when self-inflicting digital wounds. Silver linings, right?)

Recovery and Surprise

Reloading the MS Office suite from the Microosft Store was not going to be a problem. But then came the real surprise. The reinstalled Office components were significantly smaller than their previous incarnations! It was like they'd gone on a digital diet. Skype for Business reloaded (I'm not sure why). and I was able to reset the rest of the suite without issue.

Pro Tip: My (Not Recommended) Options

My original (IT recommended) options felt like a significant hassle or expense just to wrestle back a few gigabytes on my aging machine. Options:

• Dust Bunny Eradication - not enough dust bunnies on my device.

• Remove important applications - Adobe Creative Suite, then Visio, then Project until I made room. Then buying a second PC to run those applications.

• Buying and installing a new drive (clone, copy, install, reconfigure everything, replace files) - into a aging device.

• Spending $1000+ for a new laptop with simlar specifcations.

Lesson: Sometimes you get lucky.

While trying to free up disk space I deleted Office 365. I have plenty of backups (Cloud, and two exernal physical drives) so my data was never at risk.

For now, my beloved XPS has been granted a temporary reprieve. Who knew accidentally deleting a major software suite could buy you a little more time (and free space)?" Before you ask: the RAM is soldered on the motherboard, so I'm running on 8GB and a nearly full SSD for a while longer.

~ Xolo

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