Ready to Install Office 2013

[Carol W.]

I do a lot of volunteer work for nonprofits and was able to purchase a copy of Office 2013 Professional at a very reasonable rate.

I downloaded the ISO file from the Volume Licensing Center and used WinRAR to extract the files to a separate folder. All went well.

My questions are basically "What do I need to watch out for?". I have had Office 2010 Professional installed for several years. I don't want both of them installed on my computer (I've heard too many horror stories). So, should I uninstall 2010 first or will the installation process for 2013 offer to uninstall 2010 for me?

Is there anything else I need to watch out for? Are there any incompatibilities that anyone has noted?

Thanks, in advance.

[DaveA]

First since you downloaded, burn a CD/DVD of the ISO and one of the Folders of the extracted files.
This way you have what you may need if you have to rebuild and/or reinstall Office.

I always uninstall the older version of Office first.

[Carol W.]

Thanks, DaveA. I've already burned a DVD containing both the ISO and the extracted files.

Anything else I should be aware of?

[Jay Freedman]

Besides uninstalling Office 2010 itself, scroll through the Programs & Features list to look for and uninstall any little pieces of 2010 that have separate installers. There may not be any, but you want to be sure of that.

The Office uninstaller doesn't remove data, such as documents and templates, and that's by design. If you want Office 2013 to come up with the same customizations you had in 2010, then you can leave things such as Word's Normal.dotm template in place, and 2013 will use them. If you prefer to start clean, you need to move %appdata%\Microsoft\Templates\Normal.dotm and the contents of %appdata%\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART to some other location before installing Office 2013, and remove the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0 and all its contents after uninstalling Office 2010.

[Carol W.]

Thanks, Jay.

I looked in the programs and features list in Control Panel and I think that all I see is Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2010. What would be an example of any "little pieces" of 2010 that I may have missed?

I will leave my 2010 customizations but thanks for the tip about starting clean.

[Jay Freedman]

The only separate piece I have on my computer is the Lync 2010 Web App, and I'm not surprised that you don't have that. If you don't see anything else, then you're probably OK to go.

I remembered another item that you might or might not need to know: If you have a less-than-latest version of ABBYY FineReader (scanner/OCR software), it can cause Word to crash, so you need to update it. If you don't have that program, don't worry about it.

[Carol W.]

Thanks again, Jay.

No, I don't have Lync 2010 Web App and I don't have the scanner / OCR software to which you refer.

[Carol W.]

A follow-up to my original post: Today I uninstalled Office 2010 Professional Plus, rebooted and installed Office 2013 Professional Plus. All went amazingly well. Do I sound surprised? Well, maybe a little.

My settings, for the most part, are in tact. The only thing I had to do was to add C: (and sub folders) to my Trusted Locations for all Office apps that have Trusted Locations. This is the only thing I found that was not carried over from 2010.

Thanks to all who responded to my query.

[Argus]

Good to hear. It's a rather quick install, isn't it? Surprised me.

This is the only thing I found that was not carried over from 2010.

Office 2013 is missing the Exit button, menu option, in the Backstage view. (Modern UI à la Windows 8.) I know, settings are far more important.

[Carol W.]

Yes, the 2013 install was quicker than the 2010 uninstall!

Can I get to the Backstage view under Win 7? If so, how?

[Jay Freedman]

The "Backstage view" is just the name that Microsoft prefers for what you see when you click the File tab on the ribbon -- you won't actually see the word "Backstage" anywhere in the program except for one line in the Save page of the Options dialog. The Backstage includes eight different "pages" selected by the items in the left column (there is no page for Close, and the Save and Options items open dialogs). To return to the document from the Backstage, click the circled arrow in the top left corner, or press the Esc key.

[Carol W.]

Thanks again, Jay.

Backstage . . . I wonder who comes up with these names. It must be the marketing people .

[Argus]

As Jay said; it's what we see on the File tab, or rather when we click on it since it covers the whole screen; same as in Office 2010 you've been using (it was introduced in that version). So moving back and forth shouldn't be a problem, circled arrow or not.

I knew you were talking about settings, carried over or not, but I couldn't resist commenting on the minimalistic UI in Office 2013, and some things gone MIA.

[Carol W.]

Argus,

I see what you mean. Yes, it was introduced in 2010 but looks a little different than the way it looks in 2013. I just checked my husband's computer (He's still using 2010) and I see the top line of the ribbon when I click on File. In 2013, the "backstage" view covers the entire screen. No part of the ribbon shows.

"Minimalistic" is a good word to describe the 2013 UI. My husband said he thought it looked "cleaner".

Thanks!