Custom install gone?

That was the whole reason for not wanting Office365, I'll be wanting to use it while travelling so can't have something that needs a huge background download to get the bits I want to use.  Hopefully installing off physical media (DVD) means it's copied across everything it needs rather than relying on background downloads to do things.

I did lose about 3GB of disk space just from (supposedly) installing standalone Word while %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office is only 1.45GB, so whatever it's done it's copied a vast amount of junk across to the hard drive.  %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\root\Office16 shows some files that aren't Word (e.g. excelcnv.exe), but no traces of other bloat, and in particular no trace of Outlook, Skype for Business, OneDrive, OneNote, and all the other rubbish that MS insists on dropping onto your machine.  It's like buying a laptop crammed with unwanted vendor-installed bloatware, the only difference being that you can at least uninstall the vendor bloatware.

One way to resolve this would be to script the custom installer to make it work like the pre-2016 installer did.  Any WSH experts on here?  I don't necessarily want to learn how to use WSH just for this, but if someone's got plenty of experience with it it'd be a case of downloading and unpacking the custom installer as per BradM's post, throwing up a dialog allowing users to check what they want to install, creating an XML file based on the options, and launching the installer.  I could do that in Python, but that doesn't come preinstalled with Windows...

As a former co-worker of mine used to say, "If they can't get their s**t together, maybe we can get it together for them".

Actually it is no surprise that the "CTR" installation is smaller INITIALLY. That is the way CTR is designed to work.

Initially, CTR downloads "program stubs" that have enough program code to start the applications and let you start working with them. In the background it triggers the download of more program code.  The idea of the program stubs is to speed up the initial installation time.  In theory, as long as you don't start the previously unused programs the extra code won't be installed.

The forced updates in Office CTR and Windows 10 are both moves by MS to take control from users. They are trying to limit variability in the environment they support, like Apple, or in a 'back to the 1960's/future' return to "green screen"/mainframe computing where the central IT (MS) department had total control over the computing applications and environment.

When 365/2016 went GA, all of a sudden it would no longer install along side of older versions of ANY office applications. Funny thing, the 2016 beta test didn't have that problem, 365/2013 didn't have that problem and 2010 CTR (Starter) didn't have that problem. Heck, when CTR first came out MS advertised that using CTR was a benefit that allowed you to install new trial versions of Office alongside existing 'production' installations.  Now, all of a sudden, we can't do it any more.  Why?

They are supposed to release a version of O2K16 that will,but ever since RATya Nadella took over,it's small customer be dammed.

I NEVER have trusted M$ to do the right thing for the end user.

Looking at this page, it unfortunately doesn't seem possible to specify the install location, only the path to the install files.  It looks like you'd have to use an NTFS junction point to redirect the install files to the desired location.

(Does anyone else think it's insane that Microsoft is forcing people to hand-edit XML files and use NTFS junction points just to do what every version of Office since at least 1992 (when I started using it) has had built in?).