How to make Office Home and Business 2013 Click-to-run work with Google Apps Sync

Question

I'm a big fan of the Stack Exchange community and this is my first question, hope it is appropriate to ask it here.

I've bought four retail boxes of Office Home and Business 2013, just to find out after a lot of research that it is a "click-to-run" version, which is not compatible with Google Apps Sync. I've called Google Apps support and they say I have to ask Microsoft for an .msi based version, which I did, to no avail: each Microsoft support agent said something different; one pointed me to forum pages, another said he had never heard of .msi versions, and yet another one told me I had to find an .msi "transformer", which was from third parties, and when asked where to get it, said he could not reference or offer help for third party software.

One of the links provided by the Microsoft agent pointed to this article which applies to Office 2010 versions, not office 2013. (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/click-to-run-switch-to-using-an-msi-based-office-edition-HA101850538.aspx).

Another one directed to a forum which then directed to a preview version of Office Professional Plus 2013 (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/jj192782.aspx), which is of no use to me.

I've found links to original ISOs for Office Professional Plus 2013 in this site, apparently from legit sources (http://www.heidoc.net/joomla/technology-%20science/microsoft/73-office-2013-direct-download-links), and they have .IMG files for Office Home and Business 2013, but after downloading the IMG I found out it was another click-to-run version.

Anyway, to summarize, does someone here know if what I'm looking for even exists?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

The steps provided in this link http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/apps/b6q0wCG3ag0 work.

I installed it on Windows 8 64 bits.

What I did was:

• Download and install Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013 from here - install only Home & Business apps: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, OneNote, Outlook.

• Download and install Google Apps Sync from [here] (https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssync), configure the profile(s) needed.

• Run Outlook and check it is working

• Install your Click-to-run copy of Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013

• Check Outlook

• Uninstall Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2013

At this point, all the shortcuts on the Start screen disappeared; in order to add them back I searched for each application and ran it once. Later I figured out that a better idea was to look for the executables which on my system are located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15

Thanks again to @Ramhound for his link.

UPDATE (03-03-2013)

Google now provides an updated version of the Google Apps Sync software that works with Click-to-run versions of their software. Here is the link: http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gappssyncstandalone