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Ian GoodingFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Office 365 apps not appearing in Apps list; file associations not being created for Office file types

We've set up a number of new Windows 10 Pro laptops by installing Office 365 apps from the defaults in portal.office.com source. In some cases, but not all, the Office programs are not appearing in the list of apps, and the file associations aren't set. So we can't, for example, associate .mdb with Access as the apps list doesn't included Access. I know we could fix individual file associations by going to the list of file types, but that's very time consuming and doesn't really fix the issues properly.

Any ideas about how to recover from this? Using Repair in the installed apps doesn't work, either with the quick fix or the full repair option. Would uninstalling and then reinstalling Office 365 be likely to do this?

I wondered about whether this is because we hadn't chosen the file types (Office formats or Open format) immediately, but surely that wouldn't also fail to register the Office apps as well?

We've previously been using Office 2013/2016 on volume licences, but this hasn't been installed on these new laptops (which are Lenovo L440s with preloaded installer).
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John
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The preinstalled version of Office by computer manufacturers is an individual license.  Perhaps uninstall this version (and make sure everything Office has been uninstalled), restart and install your own volume license.  We do this for our client machines.
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Thanks John.

There isn't a preinstalled version of Office, though there is a store app in the standard build with the name Microsoft Office - don't really know what that does but presumably is adware by Microsoft to sign up for O365. It doesn't have any Office functionality though. Perhaps we should have removed that before trying to install Office 365, which isn't on a volume licence as it's cloud licenced.
I think what you are seeing is the App created by the Manufacturer / Microsoft. Try uninstalling this App (Apps screen, not Programs and Features) and then restart and install your own.
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Richard Schierer

Anytime I am confronted with a computer that is doing 'weird' things, I would check  the Event Viewer, Application and System Logs for tell tale signs that something isn't working right. I would also run a full Malwarebytes Custom Scan with rootkit on all the computers, and then run CCleaner, Check that all your Windows updates are current. and then look for installed programs that might not belong on your computers. Let us know how you make out.
I'll have a go at deleting the Office app and restarting the next new laptop I build.

This shouldn't be a malware-type issue, as the laptops are newly installed from trusted sources, and they're all up to date with patches before we try to install Office 365. I agree it's a random issue, and have tried a Malwarebytes scan on one of them, but it didn't show up anything useful.

I suspect this may be something to do with the nature of the Office 365 installation process as this uses a different technology to the installers I'm used to!
Please keep us posted.
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Ian Gooding
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Thanks. I think the issue is caused by not restarting after installing Windows, but I haven't been able to test this exhaustively.