Hi. I currently use an install of Office 2013 on my personal/work Dell Precision LT. A company I'm contracting with asked me to explore Office 365 (comes with Word 2016 apparently), because some Word templates I am developing for them may be migrated to 365 in the near future. So I downloaded and installed MS's 30-trial version and played around with it for a day.



But now I am wondering if it will mess up my Office 2013 suite to have Office 365. The reason I asked is, after I'd closed Word 2016, I tried to launch good old Word 2013 from my Start menu. Unexpectedly, the orange-windowed '365' dialog popped up with the message, "Configuring Word 2013..." That had me worried that 365 was making some kind of config changes to 2013 that I do not want, since 365 is only a temporary guest on my machine. So I killed that process. After seeing and dismissing some odd Office error/warning, Word 2016 launched successfully looking like its old self. Phew.

So... how "safe" is it to have 365 on my machine? I don't want to be left with a 2013 Office suite I can no longer use (or is changed in any way, for that matter) once 365 goes bye-bye.

You cannot have a single-install version of Office and a subscription version of any flavour installed on the same system.

Functionally, there is little difference between Office 2013/2016 and Office 365; anything developed for Office 2013 should work fine on Office 2016.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Can't? or Shouldn't? 'Cause I kinda do have them both on this one machine right now.

But since I learned what I needed from the 365 install, should I just uninstall it and 2016 now? In case I wasn't clear, I DO NOT want to keep 2016. I'm happy with 2013.

FWIW, I just closed Word 2013 and relaunched it again from the Start icon. 365 tried to do that "configure" thing on it again. So I killed it again using Task Manager. Dismissed the subsequent error message and Word 2013 launched normally again. However, if I "open" a Word file from a directory, it opens in Word 2016.

Oddly, I can launch Excel 2013 without drama. And if I open a .xlsx from a directory it opens in Excel 2013. Kinda inconsistent, the way this is all working.

According to MS it's can't. You can, however, have two or more different single-install versions of Office installed on the same system.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Thanks. I'm not sure then. I am, to be honest, a little fuzzy on what a "single-install version" is.

I can tell you that my machine had a fresh install of Windows 10 last February, done by our IT person at my job. She also installed a licensed copy of Office 2013. Since then I have only used Word and Excel.

Fast-forward to last Tuesday. At the request of my client I downloaded a 30-day trial version of Office 365 from Microsoft:

https://products.office.com/en-us/try

It came with: "Fully installed Office 2016 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and more."

So whatever you call these two things together. Meaning my Office 2013 and this new Office 2016. FWIW, I would assume that MS doesn't expect prospective converts to 365 to uninstall their existing Office installations prior to "trying" 365.

In any case, Office 365 can't seem to keep its mitts off my Word 2013. I always have to step in and shoo it away.

It's all resolved now. Thanks. I managed to blow away 365 + Office 2016 without damaging anything else.

FWIW, no matter what MS may think, it is possible to have lots of .msi (i.e. non-subscription) versions of Office alongside a 365 version. You can't however have multiple click-to-run versions installed, to the best of my knowledge.