Obtaining Volume Licensed Microsoft Office Installer

Please Note:
Unlike many of the articles on this site, this article is written for “IT people” and relates to technical subject matter.
Only follow the below info if suitable to your specific situation and you understand and accept all risk.

This article applies to “Volume Licensing” Microsoft Office licenses. It assumes you have recently purchased a volume license key and need to obtain an installer for it.

Obtaining your key

1. Get access to VLSC. This will require you to register and accept the agreement if you haven’t already.
2. Find the Downloads and Keys Tab.
3. Location the Version you want and select the option that has the type listed at MAK. Only use KMS if you are using an internal activation server.
4. Make a copy of the key to use in the install process.

Getting the configuration file

1. Go to config.office.com.
2. Select the ‘Create’ option to begin creating a config file.
   This will be used to tell the Office Deployment Tool, what type of installer to create for office.
3. You’ll most likely want to select the 64 bit version, Office Standard 2019 – Volume License, and switch off any app you don’t want to include in this installer (for example you may wish to remove OneDrive if you plan to manage it separately).
4. Select the correct language.
5. Under Installer, if you don’t want the installer to download every time it’s run and want an “offline” installer, select the local source and put C:\officesetup, this means the required files will be downloaded into that folder.
6. Under the ‘Installer’ section, you may choose to switch off the “Show installation to user” to make the install silent if deploying it with deployment tools.
7. By default this installer will try to uninstall older versions of Visio, Project, SharePoint Designer and InfoPath. This is done to compatibility considerations between the different installer types of Office, you may want to take not if these are in use in your environment.
8. Under Licensing and activation, you will want to set if you are using a KMS client key or a MAK key. This is where you add your license key, make sure it matches the office version you selected and you are using the correct key (Most likely MAK). You’ll only use a KMS key if you plan to run an internal activation server.
9. You can also add organizational details and specific application preferences but these are safe to leave blank.
10. Select the export button, name the file something easy to identify such as ‘office-config-standard-2021’ and export it. This will download all your settings as an .xml file you can use with the office deployment tool.

Generating and downloading the installer

1. Download the Office Deployment Tool (ODT).
2. Extract the contents to a folder of your choice, an easy location would be C:\ODT
3. Put the configuration file in the same location.
4. Hold Shift and right click in the folder, select ‘open PowerShell here’.
5. In PowerShell type:
   .\setup.exe /download Configuration-File-Name.xml
   This will download install data based on your configuration file name.
6. Wait for it to finish loading, this will take awhile, as it will be downloading office (If you selected a local install source in your config). You can check if it’s working by looking at ask manager and checking network activity. You’ll see the C:\officesetup folder growing (or wherever you chose the source location to be).
7. You now have now downloaded the specific installer with your key and configuration.

Running the installer

1. Once it finishes and you get a command prompt back, run the same command as above with /download replaced with /configure:
   .\setup.exe /configure Configuration-File-Name.xml
2. Depending on your settings either this will run silently or you’ll see a progress display.
3. To make it easy to run you can move the setup.exe and config.xml file you used into the C:\officesetup location and create a bat file so you can double click on it to run.
4. If you need to install office on another computer simply copy everything (including setup.exe and config.xml) in the c:\officesetup file to the target computer and run it using the .\setup.exe /configure Configuration-File-Name.xml command.

Troubleshooting

• If your office fails to activate confirm your license key is correct and the version of office it is for matches the one you select when creating your config.
• If the installer fails to run make sure your command is correct, and use a config file without spaces in the names.
• If the installer fails to run check if you are running in powershell or cmd, for poweshell you need to type .\setup.exe for cmd only setup.exe is required.
• If you are unable to enter a license key in your config it’s likely due to setting the version as 365 which does not use license keys.

Further Reading:

• Deploy Office 2019 (for IT Pros) – Deploy Office | Microsoft Docs