Microsoft Office 2013 Professional Plus

Overview

Office 2013 is the lightest suite that still opens everything a current one produces, and that combination is why it keeps being downloaded years after it stopped being anyone's default. On an older machine, or a virtual one with a couple of gigabytes assigned to it, this suite starts in seconds and stays responsive through a long document in a way its successors do not. The flat interface it introduced has aged into looking plain rather than dated.

This is the Professional Plus edition, the full lineup: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath and the Lync client. The archive contains both installer architectures, the licensing has been settled ahead of time so there is no product key screen, and a magnet is posted for anyone who would rather pull it as a torrent.

The applications

The core three are complete with no feature held back. Excel has the full function library, pivot tables, the data model and the analysis add-ins. Word has references, mail merge, track changes and the full styles system. PowerPoint has presenter view, the animation set and the widescreen defaults this cycle introduced. Outlook is the complete desktop client with local data file storage and support for both standard mail protocols and the corporate account type.

Beyond those, this tier adds Access for local databases, Publisher for short run print work, InfoPath for form design, and the Lync client for organisations that still run that server. InfoPath in particular only exists in this generation of the suite, which is the specific reason a number of people come looking for the 2013 build rather than a newer one.

Running it on a modern machine

It installs on current Windows without complaint, and everything works, but there are two rough edges worth knowing. High density displays are handled at a fixed scale rather than dynamically, so on a very high resolution panel the interface can look soft unless you set the compatibility scaling override on the application shortcuts. The readme has the exact setting.

The second is that the touch mode and the handwriting features were built for the tablet hardware of that period and do not map well onto current pen input. If either matters to you, a newer suite is the better answer. For keyboard and mouse work at a desk, none of this is relevant.

File compatibility

The document formats are the same ones current versions write, so files move in both directions without conversion. Features added to the suite after this cycle appear as static content when opened here, which means they display and print correctly but cannot be edited. That is the same behaviour any older build shows and it rarely causes a problem in practice.

Older formats from the pre-ribbon era open directly with no compatibility pack required, and can be saved back out in the old format if you need to hand a file to a machine running something genuinely ancient.

What you get

• Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath and the Lync client
• InfoPath form designer, which exists only in this generation of the suite
• Both 32-bit and 64-bit installers in one archive
• Volume channel build with licensing applied ahead of time
• Full Excel function library, pivot tables and data model
• Outlook with local data file storage and no forced sync
• Opens and writes the same document formats as current versions
• Multilingual interface packs included
• Direct archive and torrent magnet both posted

Inside the archive

• Office 2013 Professional Plus installers, 32-bit and 64-bit
• Language interface packs for the list shown above
• Setup configuration files for selective installs
• Readme covering display scaling on high density panels
• Magnet link file for the torrent transfer

System requirements

Installing it

1. Remove any existing Office installation first, including click to run leftovers.
2. Unpack the archive to a local drive and suspend real time protection.
3. Open the folder for the architecture you want and run setup as administrator.
4. Let the install finish without interrupting it, then restart if prompted.
5. Open Word once and confirm the account panel reports a licensed state. If your display is very high resolution, apply the scaling override from the readme.

Mirrors

Release history

Questions about this release

Comments

Comments are read before they appear. If a build stops working, say so here and it gets rebuilt rather than quietly left up.