Uninstall MS Office 2007 & leave 2010 intact?

Factual Questions
1

My laptop came installed with Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007. It was a trial edition and expired promptly. This didn’t matter to me, because I had purchased the a product key for the 2010 version.

I have an annoying problem. Whenever I open a file, it defaults to using the 2007 version to open it. Then it asks for a product key for it and then it opens the file as read-only. The only way around this is to open the 2010 and then open the file from there.

I am embarrassed to say how long I have been putting up with this. But I am now sufficiently annoyed to do something about it. I did some searching online and it appears I am not the only one with this issue. I did not find any clearly satisfying resolutions.

Bottom line - can I uninstall just the 2007 version? Will it leave the 2010 intact? I don’t have disks, apparently, they just don’t do that any more. So I would really like to avoid having to uninstall both and then reinstall just the 2010. I have the product key kicking around here somewhere and could be pressed to find it if I really had to.

I am hoping that a quick uninstall will relieve me of my woes.

What say you, tech savvy dopers?

2

yes, you can just remove 2007

If needed, 2010 can repair itself, there’s a 2nd copy for repairing any part of it, eg even if there were errors in copying the files from one drive to another or a antivirus removed some of the files.
Also, your 2010 key allows you to download and install 2010 again , as much as you want.

But you also have this image still, from where you first downloaded it ?

3

Tangentially related to the OP:

If you’ve been suffering with the ‘wrong’ program opening by default, change the default program.

Got to CONTROL PANEL>DEFAULT PROGRAMS and change things to suit your preference.

4

I tried that, they weren’t in the list.