Worried about losing data/emails when upgrading Office 2010 to 2013 ? It’s shouldn’t be a drama, and I’ll run you through what I did to help you doing it seamlessly yourself.
I had Office Professional 2010 on my main PC, and realising I had a Office 365 home license not fully utilised, I thought it would be a good idea for a Sunday project – well let’s see how good/bad an idea it was ….
Anyway, first things first – my usual disclaimer. I take no responsibility for any loss of data or any damage to your computer following any info given on this website. It is up to you to take your own responsibility and backup of data.
OK, my OS of choice in Windows 7 ultimate. I must say, quite a good one too. No problems with it. I was a bit nervous about upgrading office as I had 6 emails address configured. Yes I keep multiple backups but it definitely would be a major pain to set it all up from scratch.
After doing quite a bit of googling, I couldn’t find any one definitive guide that I had any confidence in. A lot of people had different issues – and you might also. But here’s what I did to upgrade to Office 2013- and it turned out a lot better that I thought it would.
First of all, backup all you data files and contacts. Always plan for the worst case scenario – you will never be disappointed.
Uninstall Office 2010. Why? If not uninstalled, there will be files left over that Office 2013 doesn’t use, so it’s important to do if disk space is of a concern. As you will find out at the end of this exercise, all your settings and email setup will actually stay intact once you have finished upgrading Office 2010 to 2013 – pretty cool huh?
Restart your PC – Probably not essential, but it’s something I always do after an uninstall. A habit from the old days with any software.
Install Office 2013. Probably the easiest step. Just follow your nose with any prompts that come up.
Once completed, you’ll receive a message that you’re good to go!
For me, I had to check out Outlook straight away. When I started it up, this message came up:
Once done, I noticed all my email was still there and all the settings were just as they were when I last used Outlook 2010!
Wow – awesome stuff.
What I also noticed is that there was some additional updating going on in the background when I saw this:
Just one additional note, every now and then a window would pop up asking me to activate Office 365 – when I clicked on the button, an error would be returned and the activation would not continue. Normally it should activate itself in the background but for some reason mine was not. Unfortunately I did not think at the time to get a screenshot.
Simple fix (but took me a while to work out) – Right click on one of your office applications and select ‘run as administrator’. What you will find (although again it will happen in the background) is that the activation will now occur. After this, you will now have to open the office applications as ‘administrator’.
Did the above work for you? Or did you get other errors in the upgrade? Leave a message below.