Skip to content

OneNote 2010 with earlier versions of Office

How to install OneNote 2010 only on an Office 2007 computer. Handy for Windows Mobile 7 users.

Bryan J writes:

I would like to use OneNote 2010 because of my new Windows Mobile 7 phone. So…

1. is OneNote 2010 going to play nicely in my XP & Office 2007 environment, and

2. is there a way to easily port my Outlook 2007 Notes into OneNote 2010

Windows Mobile 7 works best with Outlook 2010 on the desktop but there’s no reason to buy the entire Office 2010 if you don’t want to.

OneNote 2010 will work fine with the other Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel, Outlook etc). You’ll just replace OneNote 2007 with OneNote 2010.

When installing OneNote 2010 make sure you choose the Customize install option. Make sure that the ‘Upgrade’ tab has the setting to ‘Keep all previous versions’ or only remove OneNote 2007 and leave the other Office 2007 programs intact.

It’s probably best to only have one version of OneNote on the computer to save confusion.

Office 2010: the real startup guide goes into a lot of detail on installing Office 2010 including multiple versions of Office on the one computer.

 

File compatibility is one thing that OneNote users have never had to worry about. The OneNote team at Microsoft deals with file format changes very smoothly and in a way that should be emulated by other developers at Microsoft.

When you open an ‘old’ OneNote file in OneNote 2010, even one created during the beta testing, you’ll be either given the choice to convert or leave OneNote 2007 notebooks in that format. If the existing notebook format isn’t supported in One Note 2010 (eg beta versions or much older notebooks), you’ll be informed that a conversion is required. The conversion is then done quickly and without fuss – if only it was always that easy.

About this author