Hi,

We have 4 Remote Desktop Servers 2012R2 with Office 2013 Standard.
We also own Open Licenses for this for each user.

1 user now needs PowerPivots in Excel, which is only available in Excel 2013 Professional, not in the standard edition.
We purchased 1 Open License for this user for Office 2013 Pro.

On a Testserver I've installed Office 2013 Standard with all features.
After that I've installed Excel 2013 Professional.
Now, whenever someone opens "Excel 2013" on Testserver from apps it opens Excel 2013 Professional, not standard.
Apparently Excel has totally forgotten about the Standard version.
I wouldn't even know how I can specifically start Excel Standard instead of Professional since they both seem to share the same exe (C:\Program Files ((x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\excel.exe). It just starts Excel Professional each time.

Is there a way to restrict Excel professional to this one user ? and let other users still use Excel Standard ?
I'd like to know this before I deploy Excel Professional in our RDS pool.

If no one can answer this : Excel Professional it will be for everyone and this thread will serve as my answer the day MS comes complaining about missing Office Professional licenses.

Hi,

Excel 2013 Standard can't coexist with Excel 2013 Pro on one physical server. As you've already pointed out, they share the same .exe file.

If you want to restrict Excel Pro for only one user, you will need install it on another physical server or set up a virture server for that specified user.

• Marked as answer by Vincent Deneve 22 hours 30 minutes ago

Hi Chloe,

Thanks for the suggestion. 

I went ahead and installed Excel 2013 Pro on our RDS pool, on top of the existing Office 2013 Standard.
I've skipped all the other Pro features during install (access, etc.).
We only need PowerPivot and users need to manually activate it in Trust Center > Add Ons. I've only enabled it for the one user who needs it and who is licensed to use it.

So I guess we aren't really breaking any laws here.

Thanks again, Vincent

• Edited by Vincent Deneve 22 hours 31 minutes ago

Thanks for the update, Vincent.