Using the Office Save My Settings Wizard

Office includes a Save My Settings Wizard that saves your Office and Outlook settings and enables you to move them to a new computer or restore the settings if you reformat your computer. The wizard saves the settings for all the Office programs you have installed, and you might see strange behavior or error messages if the same programs, including add-ins, are not present on both machines.

Open the Save My Settings Wizard by choosing the Start menu, Programs, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Tools, Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard. After quickly checking your system for installed Office programs, the wizard asks if you want to save the settings used on the computer or restore previously saved settings.

Before restoring settings, you need to save your settings, so we're going to choose S ave the Settings from This Machine this time (see Figure A.3). Choose a file location and filename in the next screen and click Finish. You'll have to close all open Office programs before the wizard will run. If you forget, the wizard will tell you which programs are open and remind you to close them.

Figure A.3. Use the Save My Settings Wizard to back up and restore your Office settings. After the *.OPS file is saved, save it to a floppy disk and use it on another computer or keep it as a backup.

When you're ready to restore the settings, copy the file to your hard drive, open the wizard, and choose Restore Previously Saved Settings to This Machine. Browse to the file you created earlier and run the wizard.

Windows XP includes a File and Settings Transfer Wizard. If you use this to back up your settings, make sure that you install the same Outlook add-ins that you had on the computer that you saved the settings from. If not, you'll receive errors mentioning missing files when you start Outlook.

The File and Settings Transfer Wizard can move your Outlook files, including the *.PST and other files. The Office Save My Settings Wizard saves only settings ”you have to save the files yourself.