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I activated my Office 365 Home Subscription and clicked the install button on the page. It downloaded an .exe file and so I clicked it, then an orange box popped up saying "We're getting things ready" and it has been like this for 30 minutes. What do I do? Could this be linked to the fact that I bought the subscription key thing in the U.S. and activated it in the Philippines through telephone activation because it was region locked? (They sent me an email with a link where it just required me to sign in and then it went to the install page)
Using a brand new Surface Pro 4 256gb i5 model
Update: Got past the first orange popup by forcing it to quit and restarting my surface then I got an error and then proceeded to click the help link on the error message then it made me download something and run that thing then now I downloaded the install .exe file again and ran it. Now I'm at the bigger white "Installing Office" with "We'll be done in just a moment" popup with the loading bar thing. I'm stuck at 15%. How long does this usually take and does it require internet? I have **** internet right now because of something called "Asia Pacific Downtime Blah Blah" my ISP keeps telling me.
Processes in Microsoft 365 for setting up Office apps, redeeming product keys, and activating licenses.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
This is really bad advice unless you really know what you're doing. You're effectively blowing away all Office software from the current machine. If you have only an issue with OneNote, this is an extreme measure.
Hi Philip,
Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Office Community.
Are you able to download Office?
The actual download speed of Office depends on the speed of your Internet connection; a broadband Internet connection is recommended for the best download experience.
Let us know if you need further help.
Thank you.
Got the same issue.
This is an example of very bad UI. Simple/dumbed down UI is only good when it works.
But when things go wrong, the UI should give as much relevant information as possible in order to diagnose the problem, find the cause, and work out solution(s).
Instead, we get "user thinks something's probably not working but UI says it's still working, but UI is lying since it's been doing that for hours (probably eternally if left to its own) and no indication of progress". Then we're told to try various ways to "probably solve" the problem without knowing exactly what the problem is.
Compare with almost 20 years ago:
Error message might be cryptic, but it's so clear where is the error during installation progress, and what went wrong.
Now: On the pursuit to "hide" complexity, it actually made things that used to be difficult but possible (helpful error messages), to become near impossible (no error message at all).
I also used the offline installer for Office 2016 ProPlus 32-bit (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Use-the-Office-2016-offline-installer-f0a85fe7-118f-41cb-a791-d59cef96ad1c#OfficePlans=Office\_for\_business), however even using Offline installer it's still stuck at "We're getting things ready".
This is very frustrating. Why Microsoft chose to use a neverending, ambiguous loop for an installer instead of a clear progress/error/diagnostics message is beyond me.
I am stuck at the 'We're getting things ready' for over 24 hours when I am trying to add an account to my outlook. Is this normal?
Same thing is happening to me! I'm determined to fix this since there is NO help given elsewhere for this issue.
I've also tried the Offline installer but still didn't work for me, gave the same "We're getting things ready" for hours to no end.
Then I tried the Support and Recovery Assistant for Office 365 tool to install Office 2016 and it worked! Unfortunately the tool itself requires Internet connection to prepare, then it will still use Internet connection to install Office (so my offline installer was worthless). But to me this tool was worth it.
Using the tool, the "We're getting things ready" shows only for less than a minute, then immediately changes to installing... (which takes a long while, but at least there's a progress bar with visible movement).