Going Further than Office Shrink

[Doctor Trout]

Hey guys,

I've been using Office Shrink (well, eventually I managed to use it), and I think I've shrunk my Office source down to 120 megs (I think I have anyway), it's taken a while - it hasn't worked on a fresh install with nothing else installed at all. I'm not complaining (well, okay I am). It's good software, but very temperamental. But, anyway, eventually, I got it to work, and I now have my shrunk down Office.

However, there are still a number of files that Office installs that I don't want. I can't set the MST file not to install them, so I reckon I'll have to remove them another way.

I'll give an example: PUB60.CTG (it's about 14 megs in size which is over 10% of the whole install) and contains publisher templates which I never ever use.

I can delete it post install with no trouble (it's often difficult to delete Office files, because Office detects that they're gone and reinstalls them, or pops up the "locate source" window, however I can delete this one without problems). However, if I delete it in the source, Office installer detects that it's gone, and refuses to go on.

All of the files that Office wants to install are stored inside Pro11.msi (which connects the files to install with the component that they comprise). So, I assume the only way to delete this (and other) files from the source would be to delete their reference from Pro11.msi. However, I have no idea how to edit the msi file.

Has anyone tried this? Can anyone give me any help with this, or does anyone have a different way of further reducing the size of Office?

Thanks.

[tain]

Never used that before, but you may want to look at this project: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=16709

[Doctor Trout]

I've been using Office Shrink... Can anyone give me any help with this, or does anyone have a different way of further reducing the size of Office?

I've actually already tried that - I was looking for another way to Shrink Office further.

In actual fact, Office Shrink only removes files from the Office source that aren't installed (when a particular transform file is used). I'm looking for a way to further remove files - another example (aside from the Publisher one) are the *.chm files. Even with all help files selected to be not installed via a transform file, a number are still installed. These can be deleted post-install with no damage to the install, however, they cannot be deleted pre-install. If they're not found, Office refuses to install.