Office Deployment Tool - Revisited

Once again I found myself with a new laptop and no Microsoft Office license. 

I found one of those gray market key vendors and bought a Office 2021 Professional Pro key for less than $20. It came promptly and even included a link to a Microsoft download site. (Don't rush to download.)

I don't need all the included Office apps. The legacy installation dialog would let me choose which application and features would be installed. I used to use that dialog to omit all the Office apps except Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

But now Microsoft has an Office Deployment Tool that lets you customize the installation.

I recalled the solution I had found earlier and revisited my previous post.

The referenced site, MS Guides, seems to have gotten crossways with Google and probably other organizations. I used archive.org to retrieve the instructions. This post is my recap of the process and is heavily based on MS Guides.

Step 0: Uninstall all the Click-to-Run Office 365 apps that come pre-installed.

Step 1: Download the appropriate version of the Office Deployment Tool from Microsoft. Use Google to find the proper download and download it.

Step 2: Double click the download to extract the contents of this file. It will create a new folder with configuration files (xml) and setup.exe.

Step 3: Tailor the following code as needed and paste it into a new text document.

    <Configuration>

      <Add OfficeClientEdition="64">

        <Product ID="ProPlusRetail">

          <Language ID="en-us" />

        

          <ExcludeApp ID="Access" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="InfoPath" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="Lync" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="OneNote" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="Outlook" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="Project" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="Publisher" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="SharePointDesigner" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="Skype" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="Skypeforbusiness" />

          <ExcludeApp ID="Groove" />

       

        </Product>

      </Add>

      <Display Level="Full" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />

    </Configuration>

The above sample code will only install Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Then save this as config.xml in the folder created earlier.

Step 4: Copy the code below into a new text document file.

    @echo off

    cd /d %~dp0

    setup.exe /configure config.xml

    pause

Then save this as install.cmd in the folder created earlier.

Step 5: Double-click on the install.cmd file and it'll run. You may have to right-click on it to run it as  an administrator. I didn't have to do this.

The process will even download the required bits.

Step 6: After successfully installing Office, launch one of the apps. You'll be prompted to login OR enter a product key. Enter your new product key there.

You're done.