Thanks Melon Chen for your quick and helpful reply. Somehow (I will explain below), I was at last able to install the Office 2013 Pro Plus Suite.
Before I received your reply with detailed instructions I kept trying many other solutions .. eventually I made Office 2013 Pro Plus install, although I'm not exactly sure what ended up fixing my ability to install from DVD.
here's what I did:
1) I attempted to install Office 2013 Pro Plus after running Fixit Utility and again the clean boot, but those did not help. I received the same error message that I described (ie. no specific error coded message, only a message that Office 2013 Pro
Plus failed to install. After rebooting with the "clean" reset option , I noticed there was some of my personal setup information retained on the system (can't recall exactly what this was , but it was clear to me that the reset
did not make my system in pristine factory image). I discovered an even cleaner reset is the following to reset the Surface Pro 3 'absolutely' to factory image using a downloaded factory recovery image that is available here:
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http://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/warranty-service-and-recovery/downloadablerecoveryimage?lc=1033
This also required creating a USB drive based install and this reset the Surface Pro 3 to factory condition as described here:
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https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/warranty-service-and-recovery/usbrecovery
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Now, after all this, regarding the Office Pro Plus 2013 install, 64-bit, it failed yet again, but one good thing was that the error message stated something different ie containing the text
" Background installation ran into a problem. ... We'll automatically resume...." . With this information, I explored the internet over the weekend and I found the following valuable site on the web:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2013_release-office_install/unable-to-install-office-2013-error-codes-30102-1/fde35d75-bddc-4dd6-bd0a-e01d07420f49
Although I did not observe the error codes (apparently, it is explained that MS has stopped showing many error codes) as depicted, but the symptoms were identical. And so reading the link, there was one user , Rohn007, who compiled a beautiful listing of this
problem of installing Office 2013 Pro with suggested solutions; lo and behold, the solution describing
multiple wireless devices seemed to solve the problem. In other words, by being a heavy MS early-adopter, during Office 2013 Pro Plus install, I had a couple of MS devices, like Lumia phone, pc, etc.. all linked to the same wireless router
during my attempts to install to the Surface Pro 3. I have only a single MSN user ID and password for all the devices. I could be wrong, but this situation with shared wireless apparently can mess up the installs of Office 2013 Pro Plus- but often it
is disguised and murky because no error codes are generated. By turning off all the wireless connections except for the one connecting to the Surface Pro 3, I was AT LAST ABLE TO INSTALL OFFICE 2013.
In the end, I installed Office 2013 32 bit, but I really wanted 64 bit. I will try now and uninstall everything again. and then go for the 64 bit version.
I was very worn out by this experience. A full 2 days trying to install a brand new Office 2013 onto the brand new Surface Pro 3 with Win 8.1 apparently all came down to the fact maybe that I had too many wireless connections going! In the end I am
happy that I can finally discover this beautiful piece of hardware, but I am a bit scared since I also would like to install Adobe CS4 from DVD drive and I am worried that I will again have much trouble. Do you have any suggestions when installing the Adobe
CS 4 Master Collection, are there suggested steps to take? I like the idea of running Event Viewer, do you think that cab be helpful during installs.
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Marked as answer by
Melon Chen CHNMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator
Monday, December 01, 2014 6:01 AM