How to downgrade Office 2013 to 2010?

Question

I recently installed MS Office 2013. It's all working fine so far apart from one thing - no compatibility with Mendeley. This is a big deal for me as I have thousands of references stored in Mendeley and several papers in need of review which also depend on Mendeley for reference management.

Since apparently it will be a month or so until Mendeley release version 1.9 which should bring support for Word 2013:

1) How do I get back my installation of Office 2010?

2) Can I restore just Word 2010 and keep Outlook, Excel, etc as 2013?

Solution 1

1. There are some downgrade rights reserved for Volume License and Software Assurance customers. With that said, these customers can go all the way back to Office 07 Pro Plus or Standard. There are no downgrade rights for end-user consumers (OEM, PKC and FPP do NOT offer downgrade rights), you can probably still find Office 2010 from Amazon or the like though, uninstall Office 2013 and install Office 2010.
2. You might like to check Microsoft Install or remove individual Office programs and components to uninstall a particular feature and install the other feature separately, I wonder that might work.

Sources:

• More info: Downgrade rights info from MS - "The OEM License Terms for OEM versions of application software do not grant downgrade rights."
  
• Related info from Dell.

Solution 2

For your second question, yes, you are able to install Word 2010 side-by-side with almost any Office 2013 program, including Word 2013 (however there are some caveats, such as install order and whatnot. see here for more info).

All Office programs, except for Outlook and a few others, can have mixed/multiple versions installed.

Solution 3

So after hunting through over 100 posts online, I finally figured out myself on how to downgrade to Outlook 2010 when you have bought the upgrade through MS HUP.

In my frustration, I tried to open Outlook 2010 (which I had left untouched on my computer) and it kept crashing. on the 4th attempt I was asked if I wanted to repair the file. I clicked yes. it ran through some checks for about 30 minutes, asked me to restart the computer.

on the restart, instead of clicking on outlook 2013, I clicked on 2010 - and it opened. been using it the past 12 hours without any issues so far. however, I have not yet opened any of the other products from Office 2013 - fearing that Outlook 2010 will crash again.

I'm willing to live with this solution for now - as I at least get some work done. I'll keep an eye out on the blogs to see when MS finally resolve these IMAP issues - once I'm satisfied, I'll look at upgrading again.

I should add that I use the 64 bit version on windows 7 - not sure how the results will be for users of other versions.

Comments

[Robert Knight]

I am a developer on the desktop team at Mendeley. Mendeley Desktop 1.8.1 supports Word 2013 and can be downloaded from mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop It should be rolled out as an update for existing Mendeley users early next week. I apolgise for not having a release with Word 2013 compatibility out sooner.

[Jamie Bull]

That's not exactly what the question was, but still useful to know.