How To Save and Restore Your Microsoft Office Settings

How many times have you migrated to a new computer and lost all the little settings in Word or Excel that you had finally tweaked perfectly?

The good news is that you can easily save and restore your Microsoft Office settings and even transfer them to another computer.

To open the wizard, go to Start \ Programs \ Microsoft Office \ Microsoft Office Tools \ Microsoft Office 2003 Save My Settings Wizard.

Check Save the settings from this machine and click next.

In this window decide where you want to store the settings by typing in the direct path or Browsing to the location.  Windows will save all of your settings to a single file.  Remember where you save this file for when you want to recover your settings.  Click on Finish.

While Windows gathers all of your Office settings the progress bar will pop up.

Once the backup is completed you will get the following verification screen.  If everything looks correct click Exit.

If you are migrating to a new machine, it would be a good idea to save the file onto a flash drive, or somewhere easily accessible from the new computer.


To restore the settings you will go to your new computer (which should already have Office installed), open the same wizard and select “Restore previously saved settings to this machine”.  This is why it is a good idea to write down where you saved the settings if on a network.