How to Remove OpenOffice Splash Screen For Good

I have been using OpenOffice for the past few years and on the whole, I am very happy with it. If there is anything that is causing me frustration, it has to be the splash screen that forcefully take over your desktop when you load an OpenOffice application.

If you are feeling the same frustration as me, here is the way to remove the splash screen. It works for StarOffice and NeoOffice as well, since they are basically a branch out of OpenOffice.

In Windows:

Go to Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\program.

Open the file soffice.ini with your notepad.

Locate the line Logo=1 and change it to Logo=0.

Save and close the file.

In Linux

This example is with respect to Ubuntu system. If you can’t find the respective file in the etc/openoffice folder in other distributions, you might want to do a search for sofficerc in your file manager.

Open your terminal and type:

gksu gedit /etc/openoffice/sofficerc

Locate the line Logo=1 and change it to Logo=0

Save and close the file.

In Mac

Open your Finder and navigate to the Applications folder. Locate the OpenOffice or NeoOffice. Right-click and select Show Package Content

Navigate to Content->MacOS. Look for a file sofficerc. Double click to open it in Textedit.

Locate the line Logo=1 and change it to Logo=0.

I have tried this with OpenOffice 3.0 and it works. However, for NeoOffice, it required administrator access to edit the file. If you see this message,

Go back to the Contents folder. Right click on the MacOS folder and select Get Info. On the new window that pop up, scroll all the way down till you see the sharing and permission. Click on the lockpad to unlock and change the file permission to Read and Write

You should be able to edit the sofficerc file now.

Once you are done, remember to change the file permission back to Read only.