Office Deployment Tool

Recently I bought a new laptop. It didn't come with Microsoft Office.

I used to have a TechNet subscription that gave me a number of Office licenses but those have all been used up.

I found one of those gray market key vendors and bought a Office 2016 Professional key for less than $30. It came promptly and even included a link to a Microsoft download site.

I downloaded the bits and ran it expecting to get the old fashioned dialog that would let me choose which application and features would be installed.

I usually use that dialog to omit all the Office apps except Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

But that's not what happened.

The download installed installed all the Office apps without give me any options. As the new laptop only has a 64GB SSD, I wanted to minimize the space used.

I searched for a while and came across several articles on Microsoft's Office Deployment Tool. The instructions were primarily aimed at enterprise installs. After a couple of failed attempts, I came across MS Guides.

The article (archive.org) is written mainly to describe how to use the Office Deployment Tool to add/change languages within Office. But a few obvious changes tailored it to just what I wanted to do.

The process even automatically downloaded the Office bits.