Moving pre-installed MS Office to another drive

You can get your Office serial key by following the instructions here: Find your Office product key after installation

Alternatively any installed programs can be moved to another drive by creating a junction. Open Command Prompt as Administrator and run the commands below. The directories are for 64-bit Windows, change them as needed.

First rename the current folder for a backup:

ren "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office" "Microsoft Office.bak"

Then copy the file to the new drive with permissions intact:

robocopy "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office.bak" "D:\Microsoft Office" /E /ZB /DCOPY:T /COPYALL /R:1 /W:1 /V

Next, create the junction:

mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office" "D:\Microsoft Office"

Finally copy the permissions to the junction:

robocopy "D:\Microsoft Office" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office" /E /COPY:SOU /xo /xn /xc /xx

Test the program to ensure it is working and then you can delete the bakup of the original folder. Additional information on the commands used can be found here: mklink and robocopy.

Atoadaso

Posted 2016-03-26T20:22:49.520

Reputation: 199

Unfortunately, for Office 2016 it works only once! After shutting down PC, next start up recognised Office 2016 is not on C: and does not allow to start, PC returns error, trying to fix it returns OK, but any Office app does not start. Even junction is created properly and in browser it works correct. So probably this solution is not good for all users (I use my student Office 2016 account) – Pero – 2017-05-22T06:17:44.903

could you please add the missing quote mklink /J "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office" "D:\Microsoft Office" – Dávid Molnár – 2017-12-27T08:48:02.957

The robocopy command doesn't work if the destination drive is not NTFS, for example if it is FAT32. Any advice? – Andrew Hundt – 2018-05-09T12:17:16.150

Moving pre-installed MS Office to another drive

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