Installing Office365 without OneDrive.

When you download the installer from microsoft from an office365 subscription, you are forced to install Onedrive alongside all of the rest of your applications in your bundle. I have found discussed online that you can use the ODT (Office Deployment Tool) to install these programs individually instead, as well as create an offline installer to let you save bandwidth on multiple installs.

This is a quick walkthrough to help those of us who dont want to read forums :).

Tools required

To perform this installation we are going to use the ODT tool from microsoft. This is designed for deploying microsoft office to large corporate installation, however it also does what we need. The tool is configured by providing it with an XML file to definte what licence we are using as well as the programs to install / not install.

Download the installer and extract the file setup.exe to an empty folder to work in.

Configuration file (XML)

An XML file is required to specify the version of office as well was what products to install on the machine.

<Configuration>
  <Add OfficeClientEdition="64" Channel="Monthly"> <!-- 64Bit, Monthly updates-->
    <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail"> <!-- This is the Office365 Online package as a base-->
      <Language ID="en-us" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Access" /> <!-- Remove Access if it was to be installed-->
      <ExcludeApp ID="Groove" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="InfoPath" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Lync" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="OneDrive" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Publisher" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Project" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="SharePointDesigner" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Outlook" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Visio" />
    </Product>
  </Add>
  <Updates Enabled="TRUE" Channel="Monthly" />
  <!--  <Display Level="None" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />  --> <!-- Enable this if you dont want progress shown and want a background install-->
</Configuration>

This is my minimal install configuration file. Gist here. This ends up only installing Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Edit this to your liking, if you want to include Outlook for example, you can just remove the exclude line to allow it to install.

Save this edited XML file to the same folder as the setup program for the ODT, as this will be used for tuning the install.

Run the setup tool

Open a command prompt in the folder where you have saved the setup.exe and your configuration file. (Hint: Often Shift-Right Click in a folder will give you a fast way to do this).

Launch the setup tool from the command line, with the configuration file as its command line argument :

setup.exe /configure config.xml

This will launch the ODT, which will download and then install all required files. You can also use the /download command and others to cache these files to allow multiple installs with only one download.

Post Setup

Once the software has been installed it will NOT be licenced. When you launch the first office application, it will prompt for activation by either signing into your account or by using a licence key.