How do I get rid of, then keep MS Office?

July 22, 2008 8:59 PM

My Win XP laptop came with a trial version of Microsoft *small business* office 2007. Without really thinking about it, I imported a lot of email and Outlook data from my old laptop. Now that the trial is almost over, I bought a retail copy of Outlook 2007 and the Home/student version of Office 2007, and the product keys don't work, since I'm trying to use the product key on the Small Business edition. Can I simply uninstall the trial small biz version, install the Outlook and home/student office, and have my Outlook data intact? Or is there more to be done to accomplish this?
posted by edjusted to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Your safe. Backup your .pst file before proceeding just to be sure (you should be doing this on a regular basis anyways as they are prone to corruption) but MS products are pretty good about not blowing away user data on uninstall.
posted by Mitheral at 9:10 PM on July 22, 2008

pst is where its at. you can import that into all kinds of things. even thunderbird. backup your pst.
posted by Davaal at 9:19 PM on July 22, 2008

Thirding .pst backup.
posted by turgid dahlia at 9:20 PM on July 22, 2008

Yeah, just use the Export to a File option, choose .PST file. Save it somewhere, uninstall Office entirely, reinstall the new version and then use the Import option. It's always a good idea to backup the .PST file on a semi- regular basis. (Frequency varying by importance of the e-mail contents.)
posted by Dark Messiah at 10:16 PM on July 22, 2008

To help you backup, Microsoft have this tool. I use it, rather than manually backing up, because I can set it to periodically backup the .pst files when I quit Outlook. Which saves me the effort of remembering to do it.
posted by punilux at 10:34 PM on July 22, 2008

Also, do a search for a file that ends in .nk2. Copy that out and save it, and put it back in the same location after the reinstall. It's all the addresses you're typing in the address bar that aren't in your contacts.
posted by disclaimer at 4:19 AM on July 23, 2008

Response by poster: It was surprisingly easier than I thought. I was able to just install the standalone version of Outlook, then uninstall the Office Small Business Trial. And that's it! I didn't have to import the PST or anything. I launched the standalone version of Outlook and everything was already there! Thanks for everyone's help and suggestions.
posted by edjusted at 10:00 AM on August 4, 2008