Office 2013 Tip: Force the SP1 Update on Office 365

If you're using Office 365 Home Premium or any business version of Office 365, you may have been surprised to discover that the recently-released Office 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) released wasn't offered to you immediately. Turns out you can force the update easily enough, if you know the trick.

Put another way, most of what constitutes the standalone version of Office 2013 Service Pack 1—which I wrote about the other day in Microsoft Starts Rolling Out Office 2013 SP1—has already been delivered to Office 365 customers over time. That's the point of these subscription services: You're kept up to date. So it's likely you already have "most" of the service pack, if that makes sense.

Most, but not all. Microsoft tells me a "handful of updates are totally new in SP1," including Power Map for Excel. Also, SkyDrive Pro is updated to OneDrive for Business.

The issue is that you need to fool the Office applications into checking for an update if you want to get this right away. (Irony alert: As part of the SP1 upgrade, you'll be able to check for updates going forward using a new option in the Office applications.) Otherwise it will just happen whenever, possibly at a future reboot, or possibly later on.

And it's this simple. Load an Office application like Word. Then, navigate to File, Account. Click the Update Options box and choose Disable updates. Then click it again and choose Enable updates. This will "force" and update check and the remaining bits of Office 2013 SP1 will download and install.

After the upgrade is complete, you'll find a new option under Update Options: Update Now. Plus the other stuff you may be missing.

Thanks to everyone that tipped me off to this one.