I just downloaded Office 2013 Pro Plus from MSDN to install on a machine that was running the preview. As this is a recently repaved computer, Office 2013 Preview was the only version of Office on the box. In prep, I sought out others’ reports on the web, but couldn’t find anything except a note somewhere (not from Microsoft) saying that you had to uninstall the Preview first.

I was hoping not to have to go through account set up, macros and other non PST file settings again and took a bunch of precautions such as backing up the relevant registry node and taking a few screenshots. It turns out that all of these precautions were unnecessary. Yay.

When I opened the new Outlook installation, it already had my accounts with PST files, my Quick Access shortcuts and my macros in place. So in that regard, it was as though I had just reopened the already set up Outlook Preview. I suppose that means that uninstalling the Preview did not remove the registry files with the settings. the only thing I had to reset so far was to make sure the calendar showed up on the To-Do bar.

WRT the settings still being on the computer after uninstalling, I had come across a blog post by a Microsoft MVP about cleaning up after an Office 2013 Preview uninstall which should be useful if you have no intention of replacing that with the RTM.

Other than that I haven’t see anything different in my quick look so far. I did read that you can change the color scheme.

There are two things that I was unhappy about (one much more than the other) with Preview which have not changed with RTM.

When you have the calendar in the To-Do bar it only displays events for the selected date. This is a change from Outlook 2010. I have grown very dependent on seeing upcoming calendar items listed there. I am not very habitual (to go look at the calendar) and I have bad short term memory. So having the next few days or week’s worth of calendar events in my face constantly (because I’m constantly in the email section of Outlook) was a great benefit for me. It would help me keep things in mind..from dentist appointments to client meetings. I a not sure how I will replace this without having to train myself to a new habit.

The only other annoyance so far is that you can’t drag emails onto that ToDo bar calendar to create calendar items from them. This was a realy nice feature. Now you have to go through a lot of steps to duplicate that task.

But it’s the price of moving forward and I’ll just learn to live with these and create new habits. But …arggh..and to other software developers…think about that when you consider removing features when creating new versions of software tools.

Oh and 3rd party Office developers? Call me, maybe?

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