Office 365 Personal, Home, or Business products are a great way to access all Microsoft Office products on your computer, tablet, or mobile phone. This is better than buying each version of Office separately and entering your product key as we did before.
With Office 365, you get free updates whenever a new version is released, and it’s very easy to move your copy of Office from one computer to another. If you have a home or business, you can easily install Office on multiple computers.
However, by default, Office 365 installs 32-bit versions of Office on systems. I am assuming they do this for compatibility. However, most modern computers are 64-bit capable and have 64-bit operating systems installed, so why install 32-bit software when you can avoid it?
In this article, I’ll show you how to install 64-bit Office using Office 365.
Step 1 – Uninstall your current version of Office
First, how do you know if you are using 32-bit Office or not? Well, it’s simple. Just open your task manager. You can do this by using the keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + ESC or by right-clicking the Start button and choosing Task Manager.
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Any program with (32-bit) text to the right of the program name is a 32-bit application. As you can see, my version of Excel is currently 32-bit. Before we can do that, we must uninstall the current version of Office. The great thing about installing and uninstalling Office 365 is that they are much faster than in the old days, when it took 30 minutes to install Office.
Click Start, then click the Settings icon (gear icon), then click Applications and then scroll down until you see Microsoft Office 365. Click it and then click Uninstall.
Removing Office shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Once this is done, you will need to sign in to Office 365. If you are using a personal or home version, you can go to store.office.com. Sign in with your Microsoft ID, then click on your name at the top and then on “My Account”.
In the upper left corner you will see the Install button. It will also show you how many installations you have currently used out of the total.
Now this step is the most important one. Don’t like the big “Install” button on the right! Instead, you need to click on Language, 32/64-bit, and Other Installation Options.
On the next screen, you can choose the version of Office you want to install. I usually just pick 64-bit Office. You can also choose the Office Insider program to get the latest versions before everyone else. However, these versions may contain more bugs. Slow is usually more stable than fast.
That’s all. It should now install Office and you should be running 64-bit.
Finally, you can check this by going back to Task Manager and noticing that the 32-bit version has now disappeared from the program name.
In my opinion, 64-bit software performs better on 64-bit hardware. You should have fewer crashes and problems in general. Enjoy!
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