Show or Hide (Add or Remove) OneDrive Desktop Icon

OneDrive is an online storage service provided by Microsoft. If you have a Microsoft Account or subscribe to an Office 365 plan, you probably can use OneDrive cloud storage service to store and sync all your files from any devices, such as PC, tablet and phone.

You can place an OneDrive icon which displays the synchronization status between OneDrive cloud storage and local drive. The OneDrive icon on the desktop (on the left in figure below) is a system icon. It’s not simply another shortcut icon (on the right on figure below), as it also comes with right-click contextual menu items that are specific for OneDrive such as “View online” and “Choose OneDrive folders to sync”.

This tutorial guides you on how to add or remove the OneDrive desktop icon in Windows 10:

1. Open Registry Editor (regedit).
2. Navigate to the following registry key:

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\HideDesktopIcons\NewStartPanel

3. Locate the following registry key (if not found, create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value and name it as such):

   {018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6}

4. Modify it value data as the following to add or remove the OneDrive desktop icon:

   0: Show OneDrive Desktop Icon
   1: Hide OneDrive Desktop Icon

   

5. Refresh the Desktop (click on Desktop and hit F5 key or right click and select Refresh) for the change to take effect.

The trick works in most Windows OS versions, including Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8 and Windows 7.