Introduction
We’re going to explain how to install Microsoft Office from a .IMG file on Windows. There are some steps that are unique to this installation method. So, if you find yourself needing to have a hard copy of the installation files for whatever reason, this would be a great way to get your installation file as you can easily copy this to USB drives or external drives for future installation use. We do have a couple of notes before we get started with the actual tutorial. Now the first thing we want to mention before doing any installation tutorial is that it is required and necessary that we completely uninstall any existing Office files from our computer first; and this includes Microsoft 365 applications that may come pre-installed on our system. Here’s how to do that.Â
We hit Windows key and I together. We can navigate to Apps and click Installed apps. Then here we’re going to look for Microsoft Office. So, we’ll scroll down to the M’s where it says Microsoft. We still actually have Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021. We’re going to right click the three dots and we’ll click uninstall. We’ll hit it again to confirm and we’ll click Yes on the popup. Go ahead and click uninstall when the Office thing pops up. All right, so I just got the message that this is done uninstalling. So, we’ll go ahead and click close.
Now before we run into the next steps, we want to quickly brief you with what the next steps are going to be. So, the next thing that we have to do is register our product key via the Microsoft website. Now in order to get our .IMG download file, that is going to come from wherever you purchased Office. If you purchase Office from Indigo Software and elect for the .IMG installation method, we will provide you with a direct download link for this file. Now if you purchased it from another third party or from Microsoft, follow their instructions for how to get this file. Follow their instructions for how to download this file. All right, with that out of the way, we’ll move on to the web browser for the next step.
Now we’re going to quickly run through how to do this although we do have videos specifically covering this part of the process on our Indigo Software YouTube channel. All right. So, we’re going to go to setup.office.com. If you haven’t been to this page in a while, it is a little bit different than usual. So, just be mindful of that. As we can see, it says enter your product key. Again, this is assuming you’ve already purchased Office and if you haven’t, head down to that description box where you can find Office at a great price from Indigo Software. All right, so here you enter your product key. You follow the remaining prompts, which tie this to whatever Microsoft account you sign in with and that is an important detail to remember. So, ensure that whatever Microsoft account you want this Office software to be associated with is the one that you sign in with or create for this installation. Once you do this, and follow the prompts, you can come back to this tutorial, and we’ll move on to the next step.
Now that we have covered all of those prerequisites and necessary first steps, it’s now time to actually proceed with the installation. I have my IMG file right here in the properties. This is Office Pro Plus 2021 retail .IMG disk image file. So, we’ll just go ahead and double click this to mount it on this popup. Select Open and again only do this if you’re purchasing this software from a reputable retailer. All we have to do from this point is to run the setup.exe, which is this little purple and blue logo at the bottom. We’ll double click this. We’re going to click Yes. And Office is doing the rest. So, we’re going to let the applications install and then we’ll cover the final steps for activation.
Now one thing that we want to make note of really quick while the installation here is wrapping up, Office keys are a one-time use, meaning they’re valid for one computer. Now what this means is that the reinstallation process is different than the process we just covered. If you want to see a specific video for how to reinstall Microsoft Office, click the link to this video right here. If you’re reinstalling from the image file itself, that process is also a little bit different; but the final reinstallation process when doing that would be to open one of your applications after install and sign into your relevant Microsoft account, which will activate the software.
All right. So, our installation is fully finished. All we have to do now is we’re just going to go ahead and open up Word or any of our other applications. I chose Word because it’s kind of the most common Office application. Once we’re inside of Word, we can click down to account on the very bottom left. Now you may be prompted to sign in if you haven’t used Office on your computer before and if that’s the case just make sure you’re signing in with the correct Microsoft email address associated with the license that you just purchased. You can see here we have a little button to change license. So, we could always follow through with that prompt, as well, if something went wrong during the activation process. And as a last little troubleshooting note, if you happen to forget or not know your email address associated with your product key, you can actually find that by going back to setup.office.com. You can punch in your product key there from any Microsoft email account, and it’s going to show you what account the product is actually registered to. “If you have any questions about any parts of this whole process, please just e-mail us at info@indigosoftwarecompany.com and we will reply to you as soon as we can. Again, if you have yet to purchase Office or you’re interested in a wide variety of other Microsoft software at a great price, check out Indigo Software at https://indigosoftwarecompany.com
