Office 2016 custom installations

2015 is almost over.

I installed Office Professional Plus 2016 for the first time today. And guess what? You can’t choose what to install or where. If you want to leave out Access, Lync or Publisher, you need to make your own deployment using the Office 2016 Deployment Tool. That means extracting the ISO, replacing setup.exe and editing your own configuration.xml file. Then you need to open a command prompt in the extracted ISO folder, and run:

 setup /configure configuration.xml

In the year 2015!

Microsoft took a page out of the Linux playbook with this one. It’s absolutely atrocious.

This is the configuration file I used:

<Configuration>
  <Add OfficeClientEdition="64" Branch="Current">
    <Product ID="ProPlusRetail">
      <Language ID="en-us" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Access" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Groove" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="InfoPath" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Publisher" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Lync" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="SharePointDesigner" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="SkypeForBusiness" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Visio" />
    </Product>
  </Add>
</Configuration>

And the installer’s progress screen confirms which applications are actually being installed: