Forgot to Uninstall Office Trial Version Before Installing New Version

[andygonzalez]

I purchased Office 2004 and insalled it, but did not remove the trial
version that came with my mac before I did it. Everything has been
working fine for months, but I wanted to know if I still need to remove
the trial version or not. I would like to free up the space if
possible, but not if it is going to screw up everything that I have in
Entourage and my work using Office. Does any one know the answer?

Andy

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

I'm not sure how bad it is to be running with the trial version installed,
but it is certainly advised against by MS and if something starts to act up,
that may be a culprit. Probably better to sort this out when you have some
leisure time and no pressing deadlines rather than waiting for a problem to
arise at an inconvenient moment.

When you do decide you need to remove Trial Version, I think it will
uninstall regular Office 2004 as well, and you will have to reinstall.
However, this will not screw up anything. The Remove Office tool should not
touch home/documents/MS User Data, where your Entourage database is stored.
It will not touch any of the documents you have created, unless you happen
to be so silly as to be storing them in the Applications/MS Office folder.


It will remove some system setting files, which you may want to backup
first--then you might be able to just copy them back over. You'll find
instructions for Word (and sorta the rest of Office) here:
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/BackUpPrefs.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)

If you are concerned, also back up your Main Identity for Entourage, which
is in home/documents/ms user data/office 2004 identities. You should be
backing that up regularly anyhow.

Please also see this page for tips on smoothly Removing and Reinstalling:
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/RemoveReinstall.htm
(hit refresh a few times in Safari, or use a different browser)
All in all, this is actually not that long a process.