That Office 365 Customization Tool

Those of us that have to tweak a lot of Office settings have come to depend on the Office Customization Tool over the years to save the headache of having to set these on every single user. With the introduction of O365 the tool has changed somewhat and for some reason not all of the options are available for O365 that were there in previous versions.

For example, I wanted to disable the Word Proofing option that Marks Grammar errors as you type as seen in the word settings below:

The office customization tool doesn’t give you that ability though, the item just isn’t listed:

Using Regedit I determined the key that controls this is Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word\Options\AutoGrammar  REG_DWORD Value=0

Using the examples in the default config xml I then created the line manually in the config xml to modify this during deployment/install and it worked.

It takes some experimenting to find some of the reg keys that toggle various application settings and sometimes there isn’t a reg key but it worked for most of my needs.

It appears you can create just about any registry key using the config.xml during an O365 deployment. I use MDT where I work and this method worked like a charm. I couldn't find this information during my internet searches so I thought I would post it here to help someone else out.