How to customise your Office 365 installation

Hi. Since now Microsoft doesn't let us customise our Office installation and you probably don't want to install programs you're never going to use such as Access or Outlook (in my case), I made this brief guide to circumvent this annoyance.

To be able to customise your installation, you need to perform two steps: download the Office offline installer and install this offline installer using a customisation file. Let's get to it.

1) Prepare your setup

Since I have an education account, I performed the steps for Office for Business; if you have Office for Home, your process is a little different. In either case, you can see a very detailed guide by Microsoft here.

1. Create a folder on your hard drive and name it ODT. For this example, we'll create it on the c:\ drive, like so: c:\ODT.
2. Download the Office 2016 Deployment Tool from the Microsoft Download Center. Select Save As and save it to your downloads folder.
3. In your downloads folder, double-click the Office Deployment Tool exe file to install it.
4. In the Browse for Folder dialog, select the ODT folder you created in earlier, and then click OK.

2) Download the Office offline installer

Once again, the process depends on the version of Office. In this example I'm going to download the files for Office 365 32 bits. If you want another version, see the full guide by Microsoft here.

1. Create a new text file in the ODT folder and name it installOfficeProPlus32.xml.

2. Copy and paste the following into the newly created text file (you can also change the language ID if you need another language):

<Configuration>
  <Add OfficeClientEdition="32">
    <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
      <Language ID="en-us" />
    </Product>
  </Add>
</Configuration>

3. Press Ctrl + R to open the Run dialog.

4. In the Run dialog, type the following exactly as shown below and click OK:

c:\odt\setup.exe /download installOfficeProPlus32.xml

A blank dialog box appears with c:\ODT\setup.exe in the title bar. The Office installation files should start downloading to the ODT folder on your computer.

It can take a while to finish downloading and it may look like nothing is happening while the files are downloading. You'll know the installation is complete once the dialog box closes on its own, and a new folder called Office appears in the ODT folder you created earlier.

3) Customise the installation file

Great, now you have the offline installer.

Before you install, let's edit installOfficeProPlus32.xml once again to add the programs you want to exclude from the installation, like this: 

 <Configuration>
  <Add OfficeClientEdition="32">
    <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
      <Language ID="es-es" />
  <ExcludeApp ID="Access" />
  <ExcludeApp ID="OneNote" />
  <ExcludeApp ID="Outlook" />
    </Product>
  </Add>  
</Configuration>  

  

As you can see, you should add for each program you don't want to install. Pretty easy.

This is the list of the allowed IDs by the way: 

• ID="Access"
• ID="Excel"
• ID="Groove"
• ID="Lync"
• ID="OneDrive"
• ID="OneNote"
• ID="Outlook"
• ID="PowerPoint"
• ID="Publisher"
• ID="Teams"
• ID="Word"

For a detailed guide of how you can customise the installation file, see this guide by Microsoft.

4) Install Office 

Finally, open Run (Ctrl + R) once again and type the following:

c:\odt\setup.exe /configure installOfficeProPlus32.xml  

Click OK and your customised installation will begin.