Do you use Office 365 for Business, or Office 365 Business Premium, but have applications that don’t work with the most recent versions of Office?
Now that Microsoft is automatically upgrading users to Office 2016, and removing the “previous versions” links from the office portal, things have gotten a bit more interesting. As a support company that resells and supports Office 365, “interesting” is a usually a synonym for “ulcer causing”.
There is, however, a legal fix.
- First, you have to uninstall Office 2016 from your computer
- Next, you have to deactivate your install from the portal ( https://portal.office.com )
- Now you can install Office from this link (Office 2013 Business 32 bit): https://c2rsetup.officeapps.live.com/c2r/download.aspx?productReleaseID=O365BusinessRetail&platform=X86&language=en-us&version=O15GA&source=O15OLSO365
- After you have installed and activated, you will need to “lock” in your version of office so that it isn’t automatically upgraded. This is done with a registry entry, which can be either done manually or via group policy.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\15.0\common\officeupdate] "enableautomaticupgrade"=dword:00000000
Microsoft provides an “Easy Fix” for making the registry change, you can find it on Knowledge Base Article KB309792 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3097292
Links to other versions of office can be found at https://community.office365.com/en-us/f/172/t/409681