Office 2013 - one product, two trials

Office WatchLast updated: 17 July 2018

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Choose your Office 2013 trial with care.

If you’d like to try Office 2013, there’s more than one choice to make.

You can select a traditional download and install OR use the newer ‘Click to Run‘ streaming install.

Traditional download

You can download Office 2013 Professional Plus trial from here.

It’s available in either 32-bit or 64-bit versions for various languages (Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish).

We’re all accustomed to this kind of trial and installation. You download the installation files (about 720MB) as one file then install when you wish.

Click to Run

Click to Run is the newer installation method that Microsoft is pushing with Office 2013 in conjunction with Office 365.

You get this form of trial as the Customer Preview of Office 2013. This isn’t just a software trial, you’re trialing an Office 365 account with a license for 5 computers in a household and saving of documents/ settings online.

You first download a small install file, then it starts downloading Office in the background. Office appears to start working faster than with a traditional installation but in reality there’s more downloading and installation going on in the background.

Trial Trap

As usual with Microsoft Office trials, there’s a trap for the unwary. Microsoft deliberately offers the higher priced versions as trials in the hope that you’ll pay for that version later rather than uninstall and then install a cheaper bundle.

For example, you can trial Office 2013 Professional Plus which includes Publisher and Access with an official price of US$400. Many people will be happy with the lower priced bundles starting from $140.

Reminder: Office 2013 retail bundles are effectively a lot more expensive than Office 2010. Retail sales of Office 2013 are for a single non-transferable license – not the two, transferable licenses we’re used to.