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Free up about several GBs of disk space after installing Office 2016

Microsoft has released Microsoft Office 2016 a few days ago. It uses App-V/Click To Run technology. After installing it, many users faced the issue that free disk space is reduced by a huge amount. If you are affected by the same problem and would like get the disk space back, follow the instructions in this article. We will see how to free up disk space after installing Office 2016 Click To Run (CTR).

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Microsoft Office logo bannerThe problem is caused by the Click To Run system, which downloads very huge updates, e.g. about 1GB per update. But it does not do any form of cleanup. Since it does not delete them later even after updates are applied, lots of disk space is taken. This is absolutely not acceptable. To free up disk space after installing Office 2016 Click To Run (CTR), do the following:
  1. In File Explorer, open the following folder:
    C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\ClickToRun
  2. There, keep all files which were accessed or created recently (for the last few months at least). Keep the UserData folder, MachineData folder and the DeploymentConfig files. Delete the rest of files which are very old and have probably been superseded by newer updates.

This should help you free up around several GBs of disk space. We were able to run Office 2016 apps after doing this cleanup, that is why we can recommend this as safe. Note that you should use your own discretion while cleaning up this folder. Make a backup if required of the files you delete or simply move them and see if Office 2016 runs correctly. If it does not then restore them. However, by deleting old files which have been superseded by newer updates, we were able to free up a significant amount of disk space.

That's it. In the comments, tell us how much disk space you reclaimed by using this tip or if you faced any side effects from deleting these files.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

11 thoughts on “Free up about several GBs of disk space after installing Office 2016”

  1. 1.6 Gb by delete files matches this wildcard:
    c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\ClickToRun\23E07522-799B-4194-8151-3F21BF3773CB\23E07522-799B-4194-8151-3F21BF3773CB.stream.x64.x-none.*.dat

  2. Does anyone know how to change installation directory or how to uninstall components like skype for business, outlook and so on. I want only word excel and powerpoint.

    1. You can make this possible via Office Deployment Tool. You can read about the usage of this program on АskVG blоg since in Winaero there hasn‘t been such post.

      1. Thank you. I did it. But the installation directory cannot be changed :(
        “You cannot customize the installation location for Click-to-Run for Office 365 products. Click-to-Run can only be deployed to the system drive which is typically drive C.”

    1. This shows how bad Office has become. It’s worse than Windows 10. Stay with Office 2007, the last tolerable version although Office XP was the best one.

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