Just purchased today and brought home a brand new Surface Pro 3.

The first thing I needed for work, Office, and so I started to install, via USB DVD drive, the program Office Professional Plus 2013 - the fully loaded flagship version of Office that I purchased in March of 2014.

I was shocked that I am unable to install it. I first tried installing the 64-Bit Office version, since Windows 8.1 is 64-bit. Next I learned that I must uninstall the 32-bit trial versions of Office that came pre-loaded onto the Surface Pro 3. I even used the Microsoft Office Fixit utilities and the Support descriptions of manual removal of previous versions of Office.Resetting the Surface Pro 3, uninstalling all Office products from it, and installing as 32-bit did not help either.

The errors I see are not describable, because nothing happens, the install just hangs with no messages. The machine keeps operating fine, but the Office installs do not work at all.

All of these efforts have only led to frustration.It appears to me that the flagship 2014 Surface Pro 3 and the Office Professional Plus 2013 (purchased only this Spring) are incompatible. This came as a great shock for me because in all my history of installing current MS software on current systems, I have never had this problem. Maybe back in the days of Windows 3.1 it might have happened. Please, if anyone has any advice , please advise.

Hi,

Windows 8.1 and Office Professional Plus 2013 are compatible, I'm personally using this combination on my machine.

Please make sure there's not any Office version installed on the Surface Pro 3, running Fix it again is suggested:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2739501

Then, to eliminate the affection by 3rd-party programs, please perform a clean boot to install Office.

To perform a clean boot, please follow the steps mentioned in this kb:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

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: 
-->

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:
-->

https://www.microsoft.com/surface/en-us/support/warranty-service-and-recovery/usbrecovery

----

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.

• Marked as answer by Melon Chen CHNMicrosoft contingent staff, Moderator Monday, December 01, 2014 6:01 AM

Hi,

I'm happy to hear you have successfully installed Office finally! I didn't even think about this "multiple wireless devices" thing and you taught me a lesson.

As for Adobe, we don't provide support on it here, please contact Adobe's support team.

Regards,

Melon Chen
TechNet Community Support

I am having the same problem trying to install Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010 on my new Surface Pro 3.  I get errors messages "config.xml is not valid. Run SetUp again without using a SetUp configuration file, or fix the configuration file" and "SetUp Errors  SetUp is unable to proceed due to the following error(s): /This product requires Windows Server 2008 service pack 2 or above,  Correct the issue an rerun setup." 

What a hassle to install from disk. Can you help?