Are user customizations transferable from Word 2003 to Word 2010 and possibly to yet-to-be-released Word 2013?

Based on the comments in https://www.msofficeforums.com/word/...html#post42590, I'm seriously thinking about doing a once-in-a-decade upgrade to Word 2013. But it dawned on me that I may lose my precious user customizations.



For example, will the toolbars that I've carefully crafted over many years seamlessly migrate to Word 2013 (2010)? How about the keyboard shortcuts saved in a normal.dot? It will be a PITA if I had to re-assign keys to my liking.

As a safety precaution I would recommend taking a backup of all the templates where you have customised for your own use. The test them on a machine with Office 2010. This way you could make sure you dont lose anything prior to upgrading. Testing them on another machine with Office 2010 will NOT have any detrimental effect on that machine. However what you will need to do is make sure that your templates are called something unique in order not to corrupt any templates on the test machine.
Hope this helps.
Good luck.
Tony

Speaking of which, what are the files that I need to transfer for testing?

Template (DOT) files harbor styles, macros, and keyboard/menu/toolbar customizations. For autotext, you have to follow http://word.mvps.org/faqs/customizat...utocorrect.htm.

Any other customizations that may not carry over by simply transferring template files?

You need to test the "Templates" where you have made user customisations. The usual one is your Normal.dot template but you may have others.
Tony