Microsoft 365 is the productivity cloud that brings together best-in-class Office apps with powerful cloud services, device management, and advanced security to transform the way you work. Start working remotely right away with Microsoft Teams. Get six months free of Business Essentials with annual. Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack Service Pack 3 (SP3) provides the latest updates to Office Compatibility Pack. These updates include two main categories of fixes: Previously unreleased fixes that were made specifically for this service pack. In addition to general product fixes, this includes improvements in stability, performance,.
-->Office 2010 will reach its end of support on October 13, 2020. If you haven't already begun to upgrade your Office 2010 environment, we recommend you start now.
Also, support for Windows 7 ended on January 14, 2020. Even though Office 2010 is still supported until October, Windows 7 will no longer receive security updates after January 2020, unless you purchase Extended Security Updates (ESU). Without ESU, Windows 7 is vulnerable to security threats. For more information, see the Windows 7 end of support site and Lifecycle FAQ-Extended Security Updates.
This article provides recommendations, information, and links to help administrators and IT Pros in large enterprises plan their upgrades to Office 365 ProPlus.
Note
- If you're a home user who wants to upgrade from Office 2010 to the latest version of Office, see How do I upgrade Office?
- If you're an admin at a small business or organization who wants to help your users upgrade to the latest version of Office, see Upgrade your Office 365 for business users to the latest Office client.
We also recommend business and enterprise customers use the deployment benefits provided by Microsoft and Microsoft Certified Partners, including Microsoft FastTrack for cloud migrations and Software Assurance Planning Services for on-premises upgrades.
What does end of support mean?
Office 2010, like almost all Microsoft products, has a support lifecycle during which we provide bug fixes and security fixes. This lifecycle lasts for a certain number of years from the date of the product's initial release. For Office 2010, the support lifecycle is 10 years. The end of this lifecycle is known as the product's end of support. When Office 2010 reaches its end of support on October 13, 2020, Microsoft will no longer provide the following:
Technical support for issues
Bug fixes for issues that are discovered
Security fixes for vulnerabilities that are discovered
Because of the changes listed above, we strongly recommend that you upgrade as soon as possible.
What are my options?
With Office 2010 reaching its end of support, this is a good time to explore your options and prepare an upgrade plan to either of these latest versions of Office:
Office 365 ProPlus, the subscription version of Office that comes with most Office 365 enterprise plans.
Office 2019, which is sold as a one-time purchase and available for one computer per license.
A key difference between Office 365 ProPlus and Office 2019 is that Office 365 ProPlus is updated on a regular basis, as often as monthly, with new features. Office 2019 only has the same features that it had when it was released in October 2018.
This article provides guidance on upgrading to Office 365 ProPlus.
What is Office 365? What is Office 365 ProPlus?
Office 365 provides subscription plans that include access to Office applications and other cloud services, including Skype for Business, Exchange Online, and OneDrive for Business. Office 365 ProPlus is the version of Office that comes with most Office 365 enterprise plans. Office 365 ProPlus includes the full versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, Access, and Skype for Business installed on your client computers.
Unlike Office 2010, Office 365 ProPlus uses a user-based licensing model that allows people to install Office on up to 5 PCs or Macs and on their mobile devices. There are also differences in how you deploy, license, and activate Office 365 ProPlus compared to Office 2010. For more information about Office 365 ProPlus, see the following information:
Review what's changed since Office 2010
To learn about some of the changes since Office 2010, review the following articles: Changes in Office 2013 and Changes in Office 2016 for Windows.
.The Microsoft Developer Support OLE File Property Reader 2.1 Sample demonstrates how to use the IPropertyStrorage interface to read and write document properties of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Visio files, independent of the application that created the file. Microsoft word mac document properties. This will allow users that have the Office 2007 Compatibility Pack to read/write document properties for Office 2007 files without actually having Office 2007 installed. The sample includes a binary COM component and the component source code, which developers working in managed code (VB.NET or C#) or scripting languages (VBScript, JScript, ASP) can use to better enhance their ability to index, search, organize or edit the properties of Office files from custom projects.The sample has been updated in version 2.1 to handle non-OLE files, such as the new Office 2007 file formats, if a custom property handler is available.
For information about the new features available in Office 365 ProPlus, see What's new in Office 365. For Office 2019, see What's New in Office 2019.
Review the system requirements for Office 365 ProPlus
Before upgrading to Office 365 ProPlus, verify that your client computers meet or exceed the minimum system requirements.
In addition, you should review the system requirements for your Office server workloads. For more information, see Exchange Server Supportability Matrix and System Requirements for Office server products.
Plan for Office 365
Because Office 365 ProPlus comes with most enterprise Office 365 plans, you should review your current Office 365 capabilities as part of planning an upgrade to Office 365 ProPlus. Prior to deploying Office 365 ProPlus, for example, you should ensure that all your users have Office 365 accounts and licenses. For more information, see Deploy Office 365 Enterprise for your organization.
Assess application compatibility
Before deploying Office 365 ProPlus, you may want to test your business-critical VBA macros, third-party add-ins, and complex documents and spreadsheets to assess their compatibility with Office 365 ProPlus. For more information, see Assess application compatibility.
To help with assessing application compatibility with Office 365 ProPlus, we recommend using the Readiness Toolkit for Office add-ins and VBA. The Readiness Toolkit includes the Readiness Report Creator, which creates an Excel report with VBA macro compatibility and add-in readiness information to help your enterprise assess its readiness to move to Office 365 ProPlus.
You can download the Readiness Toolkit for free from the Microsoft Download Center. For more information, see Use the Readiness Toolkit to assess application compatibility for Office 365 ProPlus.
Assess your infrastructure and environment
To decide how to upgrade to Office 365 ProPlus, you should evaluate your infrastructure and environment, including the following:
Number and distribution of your clients, including required languages.
IT infrastructure, including operating systems, mobile device support, user permissions and management, and software distribution methods.
Network infrastructure, including connections to the Internet and internal software distribution points.
Cloud infrastructure, including existing Office 365 capabilities, user licensing, and identity.
Your assessment of these components will influence how you want to upgrade. For more information, see Assess your environment and requirements for deploying Office 365 ProPlus.
Review new Group Policy settings
As with any new version of Office, there are new Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Group Policy settings. All Group Policy settings for Office 365 ProPlus are now located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftOffice16.0 and HKEY_CURRENT_USERSOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftOffice16.0.
You can download the Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Group Policy settings for Office 365 ProPlus from the Microsoft Download Center for free. The download includes an Excel file that lists all the Group Policy settings and the new policy settings for Office 365 ProPlus.
Choose how you want to deploy Office 365 ProPlus
You can deploy Office 365 ProPlus from the cloud, from a local source on your network, or with Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (or another software distribution solution). Which option you choose depends on your environment and business requirements. Deploying from the cloud, for example, minimizes your administrative overhead, but could require more network bandwidth. Deploying with Configuration Manager or from a local source, on the other hand, offers more granular control over the deployment of Office 365 ProPlus, including which applications and languages are installed on which client computers.
For more information, see Plan your enterprise deployment of Office 365 ProPlus.
Choose how often to update Office
With Office 365 ProPlus, you can control how frequently your users receive feature updates to their Office applications. For more information, see Overview of update channels for Office 365 ProPlus.
Plan for additional languages
You can install language accessory packs after you've deployed Office 365 ProPlusin one of its base languages. There are two ways to install language accessory packs:
Have your users download and install the language accessory packs that they need from the Office 365 portal.
Use the Office Deployment Tool to deploy the appropriate language accessory packs to your users.
For more information, see Overview of deploying languages in Office 365 ProPlus.
Special considerations
The Office Customization Tool is not used as part of the Office 365 ProPlus installation. Instead, you can customize the installation for your users with the Office Deployment Tool. For more information, see Overview of the Office Deployment Tool.
Removal of InfoPath from Office 365 ProPlus. InfoPath 2013 remains the current version and therefore isn't included in Office 365 ProPlus. When you upgrade an existing installation of Office 2010 to Office 365 ProPlus, InfoPath is removed from the computer. If your users still need to use InfoPath, the 2013 version of InfoPath is available for installation on the Software page in the Office 365 portal.
Related topics
For articles about planning, deploying, and managing Office 365 ProPlus in an enterprise environment, see Deployment guide for Office 365 ProPlus.
To find out more about upgrading from Office 2010 servers, see Resources to help you upgrade from Office 2010 servers and clients.
For more information about Office 365 plans, see Office 365 Service Descriptions.
For more information about the support lifecycle for Microsoft products, see Microsoft Lifecycle Policy.
To discuss or learn more about end of support for Office versions, go to the Microsoft Office End of Support area of the Microsoft Tech Community.
Applies to:Office 365 ProPlus, Office 2019, and Office 2016
In Office, compatibility mode is used automatically to open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents that were created in earlier versions of these applications. Compatibility mode ensures that no new or improved features in Office are available while users work with a document so that people who use earlier versions of Office will have full editing capabilities. Compatibility mode also preserves the layout of the document.
How Office uses compatibility mode
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint use compatibility mode to open binary Office documents that were created in Office 2003 or earlier versions of Office. Word also uses compatibility mode to open OpenXML documents that were created in Word 2007 and Word 2010.
Set default compatibility mode on file creation for Word
If you use Group Policy, you can use the Set default compatibility mode on file creation policy setting to manage the default compatibility mode that Word uses to create new Word documents. This might be necessary if you have add-ins or macros that use the layout functions that are used in Word 2007 or Word 2010. When you enable this policy setting, you can specify which versions of Word that new Word documents are compatible with. Several configurations options are available for this setting:
Word 2003 This mode disables features in Word that are incompatible with Word 2003.
Word 2007 This mode disables features in Word that are incompatible with Word 2007.
Word 2010 This mode disables features in Word that are incompatible with Word 2010.
Full functionality mode This mode makes sure that all new features remain enabled. This is the default setting for Word.
When you choose the Word 2003 option, Word is configured to create new Open XML files that have Word 2007 and later features disabled. Doing so makes sure that the Open XML files do not contain content that Word 2003 users can't edit. However, users of Office 2003 must still have the Compatibility Pack installed before they can edit Word Open XML files that are compatible with Word 2003.
Microsoft Word 2010 For Mac
If you select Full functionality mode, there is no effect on the Word 2007 and Word 2010 users. They can open and edit Word 2019, Word 2016, and Word 2013 documents. The only difference is that new features in Word 2013 and later are not available in Word 2007 or Word 2010.
You can download the Group Policy Administrative Templates files (ADMX/ADML) for Office from the Microsoft Download Center. The Set default compatibility mode on file creation policy setting is located under User ConfigurationPoliciesAdministrative TemplatesMicrosoft Word 2016Word OptionsSave.