Windows 10 change Office 2016 installation directory

I recently installed Windows 10 on my laptop, which has a 18 GB SSD and a 300 GB HDD. Although installing the OS on the SSD worked out okay, since the setup of office 2016 doesn't allow the specification of a install location, I'm in quite a pickle. Leaving office on my SSD isn't an option, since there's only roughly 500MB of disk space left that way.

Any idea how I could install office on another drive?

Solution 1:

My research turned up, that it is in fact NOT possible to change the installation directory for office.

Quoting the references for the Office Deployment Tool:

You cannot customize the installation location for Click-to-Run for Office 365 products. Click-to-Run can only be deployed to the system drive which is typically drive C.

Source

Since this question is hereby definetly answered, I'd suggest removing the duplicate tag. I suppose this answer might save others the time I took to find this out.

Solution 2:

You cannot change the installation location, but you can move it.

That is to say you can tell the computer that the office install directory should be redirected elsewhere.

Command Prompt, administrator mode

Here, I am telling windows that the Office directory should be STORED On D:\ drive. Substitute your path as desired. And yes, you must have two Microsoft Office directories.. just because.. Microsoft.

Uninstall office if it is there. First, you must create the directory where Office would be installed.

>md "c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\"

>md ""c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\"

Then you "make a link" (mklink) between the directories.

>mklink /J "d:\programs_x86\Microsoft Office\" "c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\"
Junction created for d:\programs_x86\Microsoft Office\ <<===>> c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\

>mklink /J "d:\programs_64\Microsoft Office\" "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\"
Junction created for d:\programs_64\Microsoft Office\ <<===>> c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\

Note that you cannot link to a new directory that already exists.

>mklink /J "d:\programs_64\Microsoft Office\" "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\"
Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

Solution 3:

Frustratingly, Office 2016 has obfuscated the installer options to "help" people. This thread explains how you can set the options manually including desired components, install location, etc.