How to Clear the Recommended Section in the Start Menu in Windows 11 Make your start menu look cleaner and less distracting. Here's how you can remove or limit the recommended section of your Windows start menu Before we begin, be sure to subscribe to NinjaOne’s IT video hub and our YouTube channel for more tech content like this. Why remove the recommended section? When you open the start menu, you will see the recommended section at the bottom where users can get fast and easy access to recently opened files, installed apps, and frequently used items. While this may be useful for some, others prefer not to have this section displayed for various reasons for wanting to keep sensitive files hidden on shared devices. To reducing visual clutter in their start menu. Whichever the reason, there are a few easy methods you can use to clear the recommended section. Methods to Remove the Recommended Section For one, you can remove the displayed items manually. Simply right click the file or app and click remove from list. However, if you prefer a less tedious method, you can clear out the recommended section entirely via settings. Open Settings, navigate to Personalization > Start, and toggle off the following: Show recently added apps, Show most used apps, and; Show recently opened items in Start, Jump Lists, and File Explorer. You can also clear out your file history to hide or remove items under the recommended sections. Open the %APPDATA% folder and navigate to Microsoft > Windows > Recent items. From there, delete items you wish to hide to clear them all by pressing control plus A and then control plus D. For those with administrator access. You can try Registry Editor, run Registry Run Registry Editor and navigate toc HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows \CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced Create a new DWORD named Start_TrackDocs and set the value to 0. Restart the File Explorer to save changes. And finally, for admins wanting to remove this section across multiple devices, you can use Group Policy. Run the Group Policy Editor and navigate to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Enable the following policies. Do not keep a history of recently open documents and Do not use the search based method when resolving shell shortcuts. Run gpupdate /force , then log off to apply changes. Removing the recommended section leaves you with a cleaner and more private Star menu especially on shared or managed devices. For more information, check out our official blog post on how to clear the recommended section in the start menu in Windows 11. Linked in the description below. Be sure to subscribe to Ninja One's IT Video Hub and our YouTube channel for more tech content like this.