[Tutorial] How to install Office 365 when it's being stubborn

Divergent2000 · September 25, 2020

So today I tried to install my family's copy of Office 365 on my new desktop PC. The installer that you get the normal way wasn't using any bandwidth at all and just activated the OneNote install that came with my machine while removing the other pre-loaded office trials entirely from the system. This is of course unacceptable but I did spend the time to find the fix myself, and I am sharing it so that you don't have to go through the same mess. I think this issue might have been exacerbated by an older Office version I stupidly installed myself earlier, but I can't confirm that throry.

First, go into the subscriptions section of your Office 365 / MS account. DO NOT select the normal listing for your purchased copy of office. Instead, in the blue area above, you have an "Install Office apps" button. Click that. You will get a window offering you to download and install the "default" version of office. Instead of letting it do its thing, click "Other options", select either 32-bit or 64-bit depending on your system (DO NOT leave it default) and select the option to download an offline installer (you don't want to be just downloading that online one that didn't work yet again). Confirm everything and proceed with the download. It will start to download but even if you have a really good internet connection (I have a blazing fast university WiFi connection) it will be a bit slow. You can wait it out if you aren't lazy and impatient like me, or you can go into the downloads section on your browser, copy the URL of the file itself, cancel the download, paste the URL into Free Download Manager and get it downloaded much master thanks to multi-connection support that FDM has (in my case about 3x faster using 15 connections in FDM). You will get an img file. Right click it and click "Mount" in the context menu. A virtual DVD drive should show up in Windows Explorer. Run the setup program. If you are on a 64-bit system like me and selected the 64-bit download (it seems to be a combined version upon closer inspection for whatever reason, but that is unimportant now), it will still give an error like when you try to install the 32 bit version. There is an option at the bottom of the window that says "Install 64-bit". Click this and wait for the installer to complete. Once done, you likely again will be missing Office from your start menu. Go into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16 and locate executables named OUTLOOK, EXCEL, ONENOTE, MSPUB, WINWORD, MSACCESS and POWERPNT. Open each one and pin them to the taskbar so that you get taskbar shortcuts for each. The eject the virtual DVD drive and, if you want, delete the img file.

Edit: typo fix