I was having a discussion on bookmarks in Word with a friend, and he suggested me to check out his implementation of a query in Word. Since I did not have Microsoft Word installed, I told him I don't have Word so I won't be able to test it.
To this, he mentioned that he'll send the executables and it will work - I argued that without an installation this will fail.
I was rather shocked when he sent me the standalone executables and on running them, Word actually launched and I was able to use almost every functionality o_0
How's this possible? I've never installed Microsoft Office on my system, this isn't any "portable" app or VMWare ThinStall ( thanks nhinkle, didn't know about this).
There are absolutely no Microsoft Office related files - except for winword.exe and excel.exe.
Curiously even Microsoft Excel works fine with just the standalone executable.
winword.exe size is about 39 MB, and excel.exe size is just 35kb, which makes it even more strange.
I'm running on Windows XP, the files were from Office 2003.
I was discussing this on Chat prior to posting, here's the conversation
Answer
VMWare ThinApp is what you are seeing. I've done some testing while it was still called Thinstall and then VMware bought it. It's nice because it allows you to use Office 2003 / Office 2007 / Office 2010 and many more applications like IE6, IE7, IE8 next to each other.
Basically procedure to create it looks like this:
- You install yourself a clean system.
(VM machine is perfect for this) - You run Thinapp do to a system snapshot.
Then you install application - You run Thinapp again and it finds the
changes with last snapshot and packs
it up.
This even gets better. You can install NET, Java after the first snapshot and then application that uses NET or Java. And then use the application created with ThinApp on system that doesn't have NET or Java Installed.
Just to add the size difference is because Excel will use Word packed files. If you move away Word application Excel won't work.
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