o2010s

PowerShell script to download the free Microsoft Office Starter 2010 as a locally-cached copy for reuse or archival.

Created after watching CyberCPU Tech: How To Get Legit Microsoft Office For Free 📺

Inspired and rewritten from Office Starter 2010 downloader AutoIt script by Jemboy.

Written for studying AutoIt and practising PowerShell scripting.

How it works

In Microsoft's own words,

Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is a simplified, ad-funded version of Microsoft Office 2010 that comes pre-loaded and ready to use on your computer. Office Starter includes the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel Starter 2010 and the word processing program Microsoft Word Starter 2010.

Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is packaged using the Microsoft App-V virtualization technology for downloading and running on-demand without prior installation.

o2010s is a PowerShell script that downloads the appropriate required files for Microsoft Office Starter 2010 to install and run successfully. To do so, it downloads and parses the App-V's manifest and catalog files in XML format.

The downloaded files can be archived and preserved as a local copy for future reuse.

Caution

A word of caution against using Microsoft Office 2010 though.

Caution

There is NO REASON to use Microsoft Office 2010 today.

It is a seriously outdated and unmaintained software, with no security updates and perhaps plenty of security vulnerabilities ever since support ended on October 13, 2020.

There is a safer yet free alternative available (see recommendations).

Recommendations

• Use Microsoft Office Web Apps with a Microsoft account. They are available for free.
• If Microsoft Office 2010 is used for whatever reason, use it with the following security measures:
  1. Run from within a virtual machine
  2. Without Internet connectivity
  3. With up-to-date anti-virus and anti-malware protection
  4. Open or edit only trusted documents from known sources

Usage

o2010s only requires PowerShell 3.0 and above.

Windows 10 and 11 come with PowerShell 5.1 out-of-the-box, so no further action is required.

From PowerShell

.\o2010s-downloader.ps1

From Command Prompt

powershell.exe o2010s-downloader.ps1

Settings and Customizations

There are some variables and constants in the PowerShell script that allow users to specify custom settings before executing the script. They include:

• $DEBUG: Runs in debug mode which simulates and skips downloading files from servers while reusing existing files already on storage. Used only for testing during development only. (default: false)
• $lang: Downloads the "English-US" version by default. (default: en-us) Languages still available for download include:
  • ar-sa (Arabic)
  • da-dk (Danish)
  • de-de (German)
  • en-us (English)
  • es-es (Spanish)
  • fr-fr (French)
  • he-il (Hebrew)
  • hi-in (Hindi)
  • it-it (Italian)
  • ja-jp (Japanese)
  • ko-kr (Korean)
  • nl-nl (Dutch)
  • pl-pl (Polish)
  • pt-br (Portuguese)
  • ru-ru (Russian)
  • sv-se (Swedish)
  • th-th (Thai)
  • zh-cn (Chinese Simplified)
  • zh-tw (Chinese Traditional)