/office-365-installation

Writeup on installing specific versions of Office 365 applications

Installing old versions of Office 365

There are cases you may wish to install an old version of your Office 365 applications (Excel, Word, Powerpoint).

You may find yourself wanting to do this because some automation breaks on you because of an Office update, for example. The last time I found this was that in order to migrate data off of a Windows 2008 Server, Excel needed to be working correctly. The bad news was that downloading the Office 365 applications installer from my Office 365 subscription would not work, since Windows Server 2008 had fallen out of support some time ago.

Luckily, Microsoft can help you :)

Office Deployment Tool

Welcome ODT (Office Deployment Tool). This utility helps us download and install any version of Office 365 that has been published. Although its built to help automate Office 365 installations, if correctly instructed, we can control the exact version of Office applications that it installs. See an overview of its functionality here.

All we need to do is to download ODT, extract it to a directory (c:\ODT in this article), and write a configuration file:

Configuring ODT

ODT is controlled with an XML file. Create a file office.xml in c:\ODT\:

<Configuration>
  <Add Version="16.0.7571.2109" OfficeClientEdition="64">
    <Product ID="O365BusinessRetail">
      <Language ID="en-us" />
    </Product>
  </Add>  
</Configuration>

Set the Version attribute according to the version you want installed. Office 365 applications seem to be version 16.0, followed by a build number (which you can find on the version history page. Note also that this config defaults to the Current channel. Take a look at Channel attribute, which is documented in the configuration options of ODT.

Download and install

ODT has different execution modes for preparing or executing different phases of an Office 365 automatic installation. First step is to download the Office installer.

Open a cmd.exe and cd c:\ODT:

setup.exe /download office.xml

You will see that in C:\ODT\ that version of Office has been downloaded. Now to install it:

setup.exe /configure office.xml

Once the installation finishes, the configured build of Office 365 will be available