I wish to replace Office Pro ’97 with Office Pro 2010. Is it essential to
uninstall the 1997 version first? I’m running on Microsoft Windows XP, Service
Pack 3, on a Pentium 4, 3 GHz, 500 MB of RAM and using Internet Explorer.
In this excerpt from
Answercast #12, I give my recommendation on the steps to take in upgrading
Microsoft Office in a way that will help you keep your settings.
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Should I uninstall first?
Nope. You do not need to uninstall it: and in fact, I recommend that you
don’t.
Microsoft Office is actually very good about upgrading.
Preserve your old settings
If you have a previous version of Microsoft Office installed (pretty much
whatever version), the newer version will take care to not only install the new
software, but also preserve all of your settings and upgrade them as necessary
to whatever the new format might be.
The only thing it won’t do, of course, is update the file format of your
documents. That’s okay because newer versions of Office will all open the older
file formats that Office ’97 used.
So, no, don’t uninstall it first.
I recommend that you just install over the top of it and everything should
work just fine.
End of Answercast #12 Back to – Audio Segment
