Customize Microsoft Office Click-to-Run (C2R) Setup to Install Selected Programs Only

Question

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 Microsoft provides an official tool to customize Click-to-Run installer options so that you can force the installer to install your desired Office programs only.

This tool is called "Office Deployment Tool" and is available for Office 2013 and Office 2016versions. With the help of this tool, you can download Office setup files at your desired location and then configure the installer to install your selected Office apps only. You can also select which language should be installed and also customize lots of setup options.

You can consider this deployment tool as an unattended setup of Microsoft Office suite. You can force the Click-to-Run installer to suppress the whole setup UI. Also you can set whether Office should automatically update itself or not.

If you want to customize Office setup and want to install selected Office programs using Click-to-Run (C2R) installer in your computer, check out following simple steps:

STEP 1: Download Office Deployment Tool

First of all, download the official tool from Microsoft website:

Download Office 2013 Deployment Tool

Download Office 2016 Deployment Tool

STEP 2: Run Deployment Tool to Extract Required Files

Once you download Office Deployment Tool, run it and it'll ask you to select a folder to extract the files. Select any desired folder and it'll extract following 2 files in that folder:

• configuration.xml
• setup.exe

STEP 3: Edit Configuration.XML File

"Configuration.xml" file is the main file which will be used to tell the Office installer details about all setup options. We'll provide all required information in this XML file to force the installer to install only selected Office programs with predefined things. You can consider this XML file as an automatic answer file which is used in unattended software installations.

We'll use Notepad to edit this XML file. To edit the file, right-click on "configuration.xml" file and select Edit option. It'll automatically open the file in Notepad.

By default, the file contains basic information to help you in easily modifying the file. Everything is marked as comment and you'll need to remove the comment marks to make it a working configuration file.

Copy following code and replace the existing code in the file with it:

<Configuration>

<Add SourcePath="**E:\Office**" OfficeClientEdition="64" >

<Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">

<Language ID="en-us" />

<ExcludeApp ID="Access" />

<ExcludeApp ID="Groove" />

<ExcludeApp ID="InfoPath" />

<ExcludeApp ID="Lync" />

<ExcludeApp ID="OneNote" />

<ExcludeApp ID="PowerPoint" />

<ExcludeApp ID="Publisher" />

<ExcludeApp ID="SharePointDesigner" />

</Product>

</Add>

</Configuration>

Now some important things to know!

The information given in BOLD in the above code can be modified according to your requirements. For example:

SourcePath:

Set the value of "SourcePath" to the desired folder which should store the Office setup files downloaded by C2R installer. Its an optional variable and if you don't specify this variable, the installer will download the Office files in the working directory which contains setup.exe and configuration.xml files.

OfficeClientEdition:

Its a required variable. If you want to download and install 32-bit (x86) version of Office suite, set value of "OfficeClientEdition" to 32. If you want to download and install 64-bit (x64) version of Office suite, set its value to 64.

Product ID:

Its also a required variable. This variable contains the information about the main product which you want to install using C2R installer. You can set any of following as its value according to your requirements:

ProPlusRetail

ProfessionalRetail

HomeStudentRetail

HomeBusinessRetail

O365ProPlusRetail

O365HomePremRetail

O365BusinessRetail

O365SmallBusPremRetail

VisioProRetail

ProjectProRetail

SPDRetail

Language ID:

Its also a required variable. You can set which language should be installed by the installer. You can set its value to your desired locale and language information such as en-us, hi-in, ja-jp, etc.

ExcludeApp ID:

That's the most useful variable which we need to specify to force C2R installer to install only selected Office programs.

This variable is also optional. You can use this variable multiple times as we have used in the above code, to specify which Office programs should NOT be installed by the installer. So set its value to the programs which you don't want to install i.e. exclude from your computer.

You can set its value to any of following:

Access

Excel

Groove

InfoPath

Lync

OneNote

Outlook

PowerPoint

Project

Publisher

SharePointDesigner

Visio

Word

That's it. After providing required information save the XML file.

STEP 4: Download Office Setup Files

Now we need to download Office setup files using the setup.exe file. But it'll not work if you try to direct run the setup.exe file.

1. Open the folder containing setup.exe and configuration.xml files. Now press and hold SHIFTkey on your keyboard and then right-click on empty area in the folder. You'll see a new option "Open command window here" or similar, click on it. It'll open Command Prompt window with the current directory active.

2. Now type following command in Command Prompt and press Enter:

setup.exe /download configuration.xml

If you have set the "configuration.xml" file correctly, the setup.exe file will immediately start downloading Office files. You'll notice a new folder "Office" created by the installer in the same folder which you defined in "SourcePath" variable in configuration.xml file. If you open this new folder, it'll contain Office setup files which are being downloaded by the setup.exe file.

Downloading all Office files may take some time depending upon your Internet connection speed.

Once the download process finishes, the Command Prompt window will return to current directory.

STEP 5: Run Office Installer to Install Selected Programs

Now the final step! We need to run the setup.exe file with correct parameters in Command Prompt to install selected Office programs with our predefined settings in configuration.xml files.

Run following command in Command Prompt:

setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

That's it. It'll immediately start installing your desired Office programs in your computer.

It'll take some time in installing Office suite in your compute

Answer 1

Just one detail in this command:

setup.exe /download configuration.xml

the correctly form is: 

.\setup.exe /download configuration.xml

and the same for: 

.\setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

Answer 2

Hi, I used this and it worked. I can now install our Visio 2016 MSI as C2R, th eproblem is that our Visio is a Volume License. Afte rinstall we can't enter the key as it won't accept VL Keys.

Is there a solution for this?

Answer 3

This might help you with getting the xml file created with the options that you need:

https://officedev.github.io/Office-IT-Pro-Deployment-Scripts/XmlEditor.html