Custom install gone?

The message is generic,

"Is your Internet Connection Working? Do you have enough free space on your Main Hard Drive?"

and rather misleading.  The "space" part is generally a red herring.

The "internet connection working" is also somewhat misleading. It is not saying that your connection is completely broken, just that the installer is having problems.  The 365 installer is very "fussy" about the network connection.

I googled and found many possible fixes for this problem. I have documented some of them in this wiki:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/wiki/office\_365hp-office\_install/office-3652013-code-0-and-code-300/f5e9749f-6806-46cf-9eda-e25ec4890bcb

If you don't find a fix there, take a look at this other Wiki. Since this is a very generic message, this is a collection of fixes that have worked for many other error codes with similar messages.

“Network Connection” / "Network Related" fixes collected all in one place

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/wiki/office_365hp-office_install/office-365-install-network-related-problems-and/4d7f4eb0-5e91-4563-ace2-825ee64e0b9a?tm=1443211564751

Fantastic, thanks!  We use old work laptops for travel (no big loss if they get damaged, lost, or stolen), and typically only need Word and/or Powerpoint.  More importantly, since they're older laptops, they only have room for those two, not the entire massive Office suite, by installing that there's so little room to spare that Windows updates won't install any more, etc, it effectively makes the laptops unusable.

Some extra notes on this, I didn't need to run the vbs to scrape out old installs (which in this case was the full 2016 install), it worked fine without it.

Also, if you have the install DVD, you can apply it directly to that without having to copy the entire DVD to your hard drive.  To do this, extract the deployment tool as per BradM's instructions, the edit the SourcePath line in the XML file to include the path to your DVD drive, in my case E:

<Add SourcePath="E:" OfficeClientEdition="64" >

It's also a good idea to set the OfficeClientEdition to 64 since it really wants to install the old 32-bit version by default.  You can find other settings here.  The most useful one is the list of product IDs to exlude, but you can also add your license key to avoid having to enter it later.

Finally, run setup.exe /configure configuration.xml, you should see the install wizard (hmm, more like a blundering apprentice since it doesn't know how to do a selective install) start up and only show the icons for the one or two apps you've selected.

Edited post-install: The Product ID to use for the standard Pro Plus is a bit unclear, I used ProPlusRetail but when I tried to activate it it said I had the wrong product key, and started to go into an enormous download to get something else.  I was afraid it was going to be the full-bloat install and I'd be back to square one, but it only updated Word.

This page implies that you need to use O365ProPlusRetail as the Product ID, but I didn't want to risk that in case it gave me Office 365, which I want even less than the full-bloat install of Office 2016.  Has anyone tried O365ProPlusRetail rather than ProPlusRetail and gotten a standard install, not Office 365?

Thanks but still haven't gotten a custom install to go. So I installed the full suite 64-bit (no custom install). But a nice surprise was that, after installing '16 and uninstalling 13, despite not having the full '13 suite installed, I had MORE free space afterwards. About 1.5GB more free space if I remember correctly.

So '16 takes less space than '13 it looks like. So I don't mind having the full suite then. It launches really fast too, though I wonder if it has a 'quickstarter' program that keeps part of the engines cached in RAM all the time like Adobe Reader does.

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?).

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.