Connection: Connection to a local network for installation. Display: 1280 by 800 or higher screen resolution. What Am I Getting With My Order? 1 each Microsoft Office Home and Business 2016 for Mac License. This is a 25-character Product Code that you will own. It is good for activation on 1 Mac. The activation can be done online or by phone. Enter your Mac login password to complete the installation. Activate Office 2016 for Mac. After Office 2016 for Mac is installed, Word 2016 for Mac opens so you can activate Office and confirm your subscription. You should only have to do this once. Review the Word 2016 for Mac. Open any Office app, like Microsoft Word and in the What's New box that opens, select Get Started. On the Sign in to activate Office screen, select Sign in. Note: If you weren't prompted to sign in, open a blank file and go to File New from template Sign in. Soon Microsoft are to release an update to the Office 2016 Volume License installer on VLSC. This update is 15.17 & is the first that has a few changes that may affect the way you deploy Office 2016. These changes are going to be later enforced in 15.20 & onwards. Below are some details. The desktop apps will attempt Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 Installer to validate your software licenses every 30 days. Annual members can use the apps for up to 99 days in offline Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016 Installer mode. Month-to-month members can use the software for up to 30 days in offline mode.
- Office 2016 Mac License Installer 64-bit
- Office 2016 Installer Download
- Office 2016 Download Mac
- Microsoft Office For Mac 2016
Introduction: How to Install Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac for Free
Microsoft has put out the free download of Office 2016 for Mac public preview, without any Office 365 subscription required. The new software includes support for Retina displays, iCloud syncing, and looks like the versions of Office currently available on Windows and mobile.
Office 2016 Mac License Installer 64-bit
You can begin the free download here.
Step 1: Download the Install
Once you download the 2.6GB file to your downloads folder, click on the Office Preview Package to get started. You will be guided through the necessary steps to install this software.
Tip: I had to upgrade my OS X because you can't install Office for Mac with any version of OS X below 10.10. To see my tutorial on how to upgrade your OS X go here.
I also had some internet interruptions on my initial download to my downloads folder and had a hard time opening the package because it did not download the full 2.6GB. Make sure that you fully downloaded the package.
Step 2: Read and Agree to Licensing Agreement
The software license agreement comes in many languages, this one in English. Once you read the agreement, you will have scrolled to the bottom. Click continue to agree.
Step 3: Agree to the License Agreement to Begin Installation
You will then be prompted to agree. Once you do you will select what users of your computer will have access to the software to select the destination for install. You will need 5.62GB of free space to install. Select and click continue.
Step 4: Install Office for Mac
I want all users of my computer to be able to access Office and made sure to have the available space. Now I am ready to install. I click install. I had to wait a few moments for the installation to complete. Then I was notified that the installation was successful. And my installation is complete.
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It is now over two months since Microsoft has made the Office for Mac 2016 Volume License installer available for customers in the VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) portal. I have previously documented a couple major issues with the installer that impact those who deploy Office 2016 using automated means (meaning anything that doesn’t involve a user manually running the GUI installer).
In this post I’ll summarize two of the major issues and talk a bit about a conference session that was presented just this past week at MacSysAdmin 2015 by Duncan McCracken.
Running at the loginwindow: fixed, sort of
The Office for Mac team has made some progress with one of the major issues with this installer, which was its inability to run the license activation process while at the loginwindow. The latest release in the VL portal at this time of writing is 15.13.4, and it fixes the issue where the license activation (run by Microsoft Setup Assistant) assumed it could connect to a GUI session, which at the loginwindow it cannot.
Unfortunately, they have not yet met what I’d consider the minimum requirement for a deployable installer: that it should be possible to deploy it with Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). While ARD has a (deserved) reputation of being unreliable and is not suitable for ongoing management of Macs at a larger-than-small scale, it’s still an easy-to-set-up tool that you can point a software vendor to as a way to test how well their installers stand up to a typical mass deployment scenario.
The reason the Office VL installer fails at the loginwindow with ARD was already explained in the afore-linked post: ARD seems to set a USER environment value of nobody, and when their licensing tool runs it is run using sudo -u $USER, which seems to fail when the command is run as nobody. I don’t see any reason why sudo -u $USER should be used at all in this case.
Confusing security prompt for the auto-update daemon: still there
The other major issue with the installer is that when it detects COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL, it skips the process of registering the Microsoft AU Daemon application (using an undocumented -trusted option) using lsregister, because this should be done as the user launching the app. The end result is that installing this package without other additional steps will result in a confusing “you are running this for the first time” prompt shown to users, triggered by the auto-update daemon, which is triggered automatically on the first launch of any Office 2016 application.
Working around this issue requires some fancy footwork: setting preferences for com.microsoft.autoupdate2 to prevent it from launching automatically, or using an installer choice changes XML to selectively disable Microsoft Auto Update (MAU) from installing at all. The latter won’t help much if Office 2011 has already been installed, because Office 2011 includes the same Auto Update application, and the 2016 applications will attempt to register themselves with it on first launch. Another option, which requires no modification to the installation configuration, is to instead create a custom script to run the same lsregister command, and run this script by every user at login time, deployed using a tool such as outset.
Admins have also gone the route of simply deploying the standalone “update” packages instead of the base application, as these don’t include the MAU components at all. This is also all documented thoroughly in my earlier post.
These advanced workarounds - repackaging, recombining, reconfiguring and “augmenting” with additional LaunchAgents - are all excellent examples of things that should never be required by an IT administrator for mainstream software. These techniques are typically only needed for niche applications made by software vendors whose release engineers have little interest in understanding the conventions and tools available for the OS platform. Adobe is obviously the one glaring exception here.
The audit by Duncan McCracken at MacSysAdmin 2015
Last week the MacSysAdmin 2015 conference took place in Göteborg, Sweden. Duncan McCracken, whose company Mondada offers a paid Mac packaging service, spent the latter half of his presentation deconstructing the Office 2016 installer.
Office 2016 Download Mac
A video recording of Duncan’s presentation, as well as some his resources used in the demo, can be found at the MacSysAdmin 2015 documentation page (or here for a direct link of the video).
Microsoft Office For Mac 2016
Because Mondada specializes in packaging as a service, Duncan is an expert at doing packages properly, and is experienced with fixing the mistakes made by commercial vendors who don’t properly implement the tools made available by the Installer framework and packaging tools on OS X. Somewhat of a perfectionist, Duncan is used to completely disassembling and re-assembling a flawed package (or one that uses a custom packaging engine - see his 2010 MacSysAdmin Installer Packages session for an example) to make it as “correct” as possible, and using the appropriate mechanisms available in the Installer framework to perform whatever custom logic may be necessary.
The Office 2016 package deconstruction begins roughly halfway into the video. As someone who’s all-too-familiar with problematic installer packages (and Office 2016’s in particular), I found the session extremely entertaining. The parts of Duncan’s demos that didn’t go so well were supposedly caused by a misconfigured (or broken?) shell binary in his OS X VM he was using in the demonstration, and that the process he went through to re-assemble the installer package should otherwise have resulted in a successful installation.
Given that Mac IT admins are still in this awkward phase where OS X El Capitan is now shipping on all new Mac hardware, Outlook 2011 effectively cannot run on El Capitan, and organizations are feeling pressure to deploy Office 2016 as soon as possible, it’s unfortunate that the Office 2016 installer still requires so much “fixing.” I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that Office is the single most commonly deployed commercial software in organizations.
That Duncan dedicated nearly half of his session to this installer package is a testament to how far IT admins need to go simply to deploy software in a manner that provides a trouble-free experience for users. Software vendors do not have a clue that we do this - so don’t think that they are “out to get you” - but when software becomes this hard to deliver to users, it’s time to push back and give real-world examples of the contexts in which we install software and details of the workarounds we implement. You may well better understand the implications of sudo -u $USER in postinstall scripts than the release engineers do, so educate them!
There’s even contact info in a comment from my previous post. If you don’t have an expensive enough agreement with Microsoft (we don’t), it can otherwise be challenging to get a fruitful contact with the engineering team, so this is an opportunity to provide direct feedback.
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