It was never easy, but I do recall doing this: copying all the myriad files and settings from one computer to another so as to get an application installed to one Windows for Workgroups (3.1 or 3.11) computer up and running on another.
This time around, my purpose is not piracy — I have the huge stack of Office 6 (? the one with Word 6 and Excel 5) diskettes in a dusty box in the closet somewhere. The “old computer” is a virtual hard drive created in SoftWindows eons ago. The “new computer” is a virtual hard drive created in VirtualPC considerably more recently. VirtualPC, for those of you who don’t know this, can read virtual hard disks created by SoftWindows. It cannot, however, boot Windows from them because the virtual machines are different. (It’s similar to taking the hard drive out of your Compaq laptop and trying to start up your Alienware laptop with it. And we’re talking Windows 3.1 here, have fun with the drivers and the interrupts!).
The real, actual, silicon-and-aluminum machine is a Macintosh G4 PowerBook. It does not, of course, have a floppy disk drive. So to reinstall Office 6 from install media, I’d have to pull out my old WallStreet PowerBook, make diskimages out of all those floppies (I think there were something like 33 of them!??), copy them to the modern PowerBook, and drag them to the VirtualPC “floppy disk” icon as requested.
OK, was it just a matter of copying the ‘dll’ files plus the folder containing the application? Or did the path have to be the same? I know there was no registry (that came along with W95). Did it involve any editing of config.sys to set the paths or something?
That sounds extremely FUBAR. and so unworkable that it could be the headliner at an “Insane Computer Stunts” festival. Back up a bit. What are you trying to accompish at the end? There is surely a better way to do it.
Generally speaking, most applications back then could be copied from one computer to another as long as you put them in the same path and got all of the associated DLLs out of the windows directory as well. Some software needed environment variables and path entries to be set up, but usually not. I don’t recall office doing anything fancy. I think if you just copy the office directories and figure out what DLLs it needs you’ll be set.
I believe that the version of Office with Word 6.0 and Excel 5.0 was Office 4.3 (a friend of mine still uses it on a Win98 machine).
In addition to the above-mentioned program directories and DLLs, I think that you probably will need to edit CONFIG.SYS (probably the FILES and BUFFERS parameters as well as the PATH). You should also look at WIN.INI in the \WINDOWS directory; there may be one or more sections (i.e. groups of parameter settings) devoted to the various Office programs. Alternatively – companies weren’t very consistent about this – there may be separate .INI files for Office in \WINDOWS.
I could probably come up with a definitive answer (if you still need it) later in the week. My friend with Office 4.3 has it backed up on her HD, with subdirectories for Disk1 through Disk33 or whatever. I know that it installed fine like this, without needing the actual floppies, last time I did a clean OS install on her new HD. So I could do a clean Win3.1 / Office4.3 installation on an old HD, with a before-and-after file compare to see what would be needed to do it by the method you propose. I’d rather not go to the trouble, however… fighting ignorance has its limits! 
You are correct (or far closer to correct than I was), it’s Office 4.2
I’ve gotten everything working except Excel 5. I even found an install log for Excel 5, explaining where every file was put; unfortunately, that log was for a Windows95 installation. Some things were put into places where Windows 3.11 didn’t even have places.
I’ll check the config.sys and some of the other files you mentioned.
Working: AmiPro; FileMaker 2.1; Word 6; PowerPoint (whatever ver# came with Office 4.2); MS Access (! I’d have guessed this one, not Excel, would be hardest to get working); oh, and AOL 2.7 (not particularly useful for online, but I should check to see if it will open JPEG files).