Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of apps is hugely popular and widely used, and for a good reason. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are among the best tools in their fields for both Mac and Windows, and their ubiquity makes them an obvious choice for business users. However, even those huge, multi-featured apps can’t do everything, and so there are hundreds of add-ins available for Office apps that extend their capability further. When you install an add-in and then make changes to it or remove it completely, you may have to clear Office’s cache for them to take effect. We’ll show you how to do that in this article.

What is MS Office cache?

There are a couple of different types of Office cache. One is the document cache, which stores changes you make to documents on your Mac before they are synced to the cloud. That way, if your Mac loses connection to the internet before a document is synced, it can still be synced when you reconnect, using the data in the caches.

The other type of Office cache is add-ins cache, which stores changes you make to add-ins you have installed.

Why delete MS Office cache?

Sometimes, cache files can become corrupted, which will slow down Office apps or even prevent them from working at all. In that case, the solution is to clear the cache. And if you want changes you make to add-ins to take effect or want to remove add-ins altogether, you will also need to clear the cache.

How to clear MS Office cache on your Mac

As promised, we’ll show you two different ways to get rid of MS Office cache files: the easy one and the manual one.

How to clear Office cache with one click

We’ll start with an automatic way to delete Office cache. To make it work, you’ll need a third-party Mac cleaner. We recommend CleanMyMac X and its System Junk module. It can help remove cache files and other types of junk files.

The others include temporary files placed on your Mac by applications you were using but never deleted when you closed the app, language files for languages you don’t need, and browser data that accumulated over time and slowed down whichever web browser you use. There are also leftover files from applications you have deleted but not completely uninstalled.

Together, these files can add up to several gigabytes and as well as taking up lots of space, they can interfere with the smooth running of your Mac by conflicting with other files, and it is where CleanMyMac X comes in handy. Its System Junk module will scan your Mac, track down all those junk files, and allow you to review what it has found or just get rid of it all with a click. Here’s how to use this smart helper:

  1. Open CleanMyMac X (free download here).
  2. Click System Junk > Scan. 
  3. Click Clean.
CleanMyMac X - System junk scan complete

How to clear MS Office cache manually

Now, let’s proceed with the manual cache removal. The first thing to try if you need to clear the cache of an add-in is to just reload the add-in. That should be enough to clear the cache. If that doesn’t work, try using the Personality menu (the one that is with ‘My’).

  1. Click on the add-in’s personality menu.
  2. Choose Clear Web Cache.

If that doesn’t fix the problem, the next step is to clear the cache manually:

  1. Press Command-Shift-Period to display hidden files.
  2. Click on Finder in the menu bar.
  3. Choose Go > Go to Folder.
  4. Paste each of the paths below into the text box in Go to Folder, and at each location, drag the contents of the folder to the Trash.
    ~/Library/Containers/com.Microsoft.OsfWebHost/Data/

    ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft./Data/Library/Caches/ where is the Office application (e.g., Excel)

    ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft./Data/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/16.0/Wef/ where is the Office application (e.g., Excel)

    ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Office365ServiceV2/Data/Caches/com.microsoft.Office365ServiceV2/

    ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Office365ServiceV2/Data/Library/Caches/com.microsoft.Office365ServiceV2/
  5. Empty the Trash.
  6. Press Command-Shift-Period to hide hidden files.

How to clear Word, Excel, and PowerPoint cache

Most cache files are stored in the cache folder inside your user Library folder. So to clear the cache, you need to go there and drag files to the Trash. Here’s how:

  1. Click the Finder in the Dock, then choose Go > Go to Folder.
  2. Paste this path in the text box: ~/Library/Caches
  3. Look for folders that start ‘com.microsoft’
  4. Open a folder when you find one and drag all the files named ‘Cache’ to the Trash.
  5. Repeat step 4 for all the com.microsoft folders in your user library.

Like most applications, Microsoft Office apps store data on your Mac in the form of cache files. Sometimes, these cache files can become corrupted and cause problems running Office apps. Or they can just become very large and take up lots of space on your Mac. Follow the steps above to clear Office cache on your Mac.