How to Uninstall and Completely Remove an Excel Add in
I was facing issues removing PHStat .xlam plugin that was installed on my Excel. A warning message (“Sorry, could not find…”) appears whenever I start my Excel and it was getting really annoying.
I have finally resolved this issue and thought it will be good to share the steps I took to resolve this issue. I would recommend starting Excel after every step of troubleshooting as there might be different root causes for this issue. For me, step 5 worked the magic.
(1) I followed the steps in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MVbR4pKAbU and restarted my laptop. This seem to work for most users but it did not work for me.
(2) I did a thorough search on my C and D-drive for the add-in file “PHStat.xlam”. It turned out that I had another copy and I go on to delete everything.
(3) As I was using Microsoft 365 version of Excel, I navigated to C:\Users\”user name”\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\XLStart\ and checked that the “PHStat.xlam” add-in file was not in the folder. If it is, delete it. If you’re using other versions, please refer to this website for the relevant filepath.
(4) I also made sure that Excel did not make a local copy of the add-in in my local copy folders. I navigated to C:\Users\”user name”\App Data\Roaming\Microsoft\Addins\ and checked that the “PHStat.xlam” add-in file was not in the folder. If it is, delete it. If you’re using other versions, please refer to this website for the relevant filepath.
(5A) Close Excel. Go to Windows Start and search for “Registry Editor”. Open Registry Editor.
(5B) On the left panel, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Excel\Options
(5C) Under the “Data” panel, I searched for the file path that points to the add-in. After deleting the specific registry (highlighted in the image below), the message disappeared!
If you found this article helpful, I would really appreciate if you could follow my account and give this article a clap! Thank you!! :D
