Migrating from Office 2007 to Office365 as painlessly as possible

Factual Questions
1

Over the past eight years I have made a fair amount of customizations to Office 2007, including macros, dictionary additions, dictionary exclusions, autocorrect entries, styles, and keyboard shortcuts. I can, of course, painstakingly rebuild as I go along, but would love to find any tool, guide or advice on making the transition as easy as possible. MS has been helpful with a lot of things, but for this they have no help. Anyone here been through this?

Thanks,

Rhythm

2

… I’m speechless.

I just installed. I’d put it off for so long because of the presumed headache of a transition (the Ribbon really bit me in the ass).
Save locations: imported
Macros: imported
Keyboard shortcuts: imported (particularly helpful for those tied to macros and accessed via my mouse!)
Autocorrect entries: imported
Styles: imported (Can’t find quick style sets yet, but didn’t use them that much)

Microsoft seems to have gotten this right—beautifully right!

3

Well damn, I was composing a long reply on how to move these things one by one and on preview I see it wasn’t needed. I gave up trying to customize things too much after my 2010 to 2013 migration, so I didn’t realize the Office365 migration was so much smoother.

If you are still missing styles you want to import, open a document that has the styles you want to migrate. Go to File | Options | Add Ins. In the Manage dropdown at the bottom, select Templates and click Go. Click Organizer on the bottom. Now you can move styles from your existing document to the Normal template.

4

Thanks for the thought. Maybe you can help get things a bit more settled?

How the heck do I:

Change the default view to ‘draft’? I loathe working in print layout and only want it near the end of a project. I have enabled draft view in the options>advanced>general pane.

Since I do need to switch between views, how do I get the ‘draft view’ icon/option back on the lower status bar? I can get to it via the view menu on the accursed ribbon, but it seems to be gone from the status bar.

Also, how do I get the language to show up on the status bar? It’s checked when I right-click down there, but I can’t see it displayed. I frequently have to adjust language between and within documents, so I use it a lot.

And how the hell do I set the default language? Under Options>Language the only one listed is UK English, but new documents are in American English.

Ok, now I’m getting irritated. What the hell is it with their menu system? Really? To click ‘file’ it needs to wipe/redraw the entire screen? Really? What happened to just opening on the side without clearing everything?

And shit, JUST LET ME OPEN A FILE! When I click open, I have to dance through MS hoops of Open>computer>browse … how do I just get to that Explorer-like window from Control-O?

Sigh.
Breath.

Design for design sake.

5

I’m using Word less these days (or at least using it less as a power user) so I can’t help with most of those.

As far as I know, you can’t set the default view to Draft. But it should at least remember the last view used when you open a doc if you have the right setting checked. Go to Options | Advanced and scroll to near the bottom in the General section. Make sure you have “Allow opening a document in Draft view” checked.

You can’t show the Draft icon in the status bar, but you can easily add it to the Quick Access bar on the top. Click that down arrow, select More Commands, and you’ll find Draft under the View ribbon commands.

I don’t have additional languages installed, so not sure about that. Did you play around with the Options | Language settings? I see a “Set as Default” button there, but I don’t know if that does what you want.

I hear you on opening a file. God, I hate that dance.

6

The standard operating principle for Microsoft is that if something is necessary or handy in one version, they will hide it or remove it from the next version. Note the ultimate example of this is with the Start menu in Windows 8.

7

YargleBargleGnashinFashinPLLLAOASUDHDHRHEDRIOHEHBANGBANGBANG*HEADONDESK
I added the Print and Draft view icons to the QAT and took them out of the more-and-more useless status bar.

Any way a keyboard macro would work? Something that detects the current view and if it’s print, toggles to draft and vice-versa?

I don’t get how to work on large projects in print view. I can be on page 75, toggle tracked changes on/off, and suddenly the currently displayed page jumps to 73. With draft view, not only do comments not take up a huge chunk of screen real estate, but toggling between change visibility shifts maybe a line or two at a time.

I found out what was going on with the language thing, and it’s a good-on-Microsoft thing. I took out the other languages from the options, so MS thought “hey, he only has one available, why clutter things up by showing the icon?” So I re-added American English, left UK as default, now it shows up.

And … and … and when opening files, is there really no way to skip all that bullshit and just get to an Explorer Browse window? Really? WTF?
Breath…

There are many good improvements…

there are many good improvements…

There. Are. Many. Good. Improvements.

Arrrghhh

8

Sure, that part’s easy. For the rest, all I can do is sympathize.


Sub ToggleView()
    If ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.Type = wdNormalView Then
        ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.Type = wdPrintView
    Else
        ActiveWindow.ActivePane.View.Type = wdNormalView
    End If
End Sub
9

You managed to make me frustrated enough about opening docs that I did a little more research, and it’s actually pretty simple to fix (although it’s a global setting). Go to Options | Save and check the box for “Don’t show the backstage when opening or saving files.” The Open button on the QAT or typing ctrl-O will now go directly to the old dialog you know and love.

10

Speaking of migrating from regular Office…
Did you have to uninstall Office 2007 first? I’m guessing not, as it imported all those settings. I suppose I could leave Office (2013) on the computer after moving to Office 365, but I don’t see the point in doing so.

11

TroutMan, you’re freakin’ awesome; you’ve helped me with some of my most-used macros. It will take a bit of getting used to habit-wise, but instead of clicking draft/design on the status bar I added an icon (slightly customized so it looks like an eye) to my QAT and tied it to the new macro. Thanks!
Speaking of which—Macro Panic! I solved this issue, but am writing this out in case someone else has a similar issue. After getting most of Word 2013 up and running, I ran Outlook 2013 for the first time. It went through some stages of rebuilding/upgrading, then froze (I don’t know if that’s causative or correlative, but figure it’s better to mention it then leave the detail missing). When I restarted Word, all of my home-made macros were gone. There were three proprietary macros still in place (Avery, Brother and QuarkConverter), which because I can’t edit them I assume had some sort of write protection on them. Anyway, after a lot of panic and teeth gnashing, I found that by turning hidden file view to ‘on’ in File Explorer and browsing to \User\appdata\Mircosoft\Templates, I found NormalPre.dotm dating to about when I first upgraded. I did a bit of renaming and poof, my macros were back. Whew. I have since backed them up to a different location.

Furthering the design view quest, I found a pair of macros to make the initial view (i.e. default) draft for new and opened documents here:

The “don’t show the backstage” checkbox is very welcome—right to the browse window (and right past all the headaches).

galen ubal I haven’t uninstalled Office 2007 yet. I wanted something to fall back on in case I had too hard a time getting used to the new version. Come to think of it, I think I may have to get around to uninstalling 2000 as well.