On a relative's laptop I had selected custom installation for Office and installed only Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Recently I was doing some spring-cleaning and noticed that Windows Update (which is set to provide updates for all installed Microsoft products) is offering updates for Office apps that are not even installed! Take a look at a snippet of the update list below:
What do any of these have to do with the 3 installed apps?
BTW, I found a similar question here, but I already know how to hide the updates and the same ones are never offered to me again, so that's not the issue here. What I want to know is, does anyone know why Windows Update thinks these updates might be required? I searched the laptop for files mentioned in the KB pages for the updates, and couldn't locate them anywhere. Should I still install the security updates at least, or are they just being offered by mistake and is it fine to hide them?
Best Answer
Office updates install all relevant updates for your edition of Office, not just the components you chose to install, so that should you choose to re-run Office setup at a later time and select components you had previously de-selected, they will automatically be up-to-date.
Using your screenshot as an example, if you decide that you need OneNote after all, you can simply re-run Office setup and select OneNote. OneNote will be installed and you'll find KB2553290 and KB2589345 automatically applied because they were previously installed via Microsoft Update.