Are you sick of getting stuff you never ordered?
I had to set up a new Windows system and I remembered that the last time I tried to remove Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business and OneDrive from my Windows installation it was really annoying. So this time I had to go in a different direction. Instead of installing the complete package from office.com, I decided to install a custom package. Here is a short description how to do an office installation without the desired applications.

Step 1: Office Deployment Tool

The Office Deployment Tool is intended for administrators to customize the Office installation for use in local networks, but it will also do the trick for us.

After you have downloaded the executable, run it and select a directory to extract the contents to.
You should see some configuration-Office….xml files and a setup.exe and that’s all for Step 1.

Step 2: Configuration

Next, we need to configure our office installation according to our needs.
in most cases the configuration-Office365-x64.xml will be the right one, open the file in a text editor.
My configuration file looks like this:

<Configuration>
  <Add OfficeClientEdition="64" Channel="Monthly" SourcePath="R:\preload" AllowCdnFallback="True">
    <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
      <Language ID="en-us" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Teams" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Access" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Groove" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Lync" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="OneNote" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="OneDrive" />
      <ExcludeApp ID="Publisher" />
    </Product>
    <Product ID="LanguagePack">
      <Language ID="de-de" />
    </Product>
  </Add>
  <Updates Enabled="TRUE" Channel="Monthly" />
  <Display Level="None" AcceptEULA="TRUE" />
  <Property Name="AUTOACTIVATE" Value="1" />
  <Logging Level="Off" Path="%temp%" />
</Configuration>

Additional resources to the configuration file format can be found at docs.microsoft.com
The List of all Apps can also be found at the docs

That’s all for Step 2, after you have customized your installation we jump to the installation.

Step 3: Download and Installation

Now there are only two things left, download the installation package and start the installation.

Open a command window or PowerShell console and navigate to the folder containing the setup.exe. The command .\setup.exe /download configuration-Office365-x64.xml will download all needed files to the filesystem Path which you have defined as SourcePath in your XML configuration.
This is gonna take a while, so why don’t you just sit back, relax and get yourself a cup of coffee.

You have done it right away, when the download is finished, you only have to execute the following command to start the installation. .\setup.exe /configure configuration-Office365-x64.xml.
Done

Finally

You can keep the installation files if you think you will need them again, or you can simply delete both folders.