Microsoft Office questions

RhinoCan · 12 Jun 2015

I'm trying to help a friend with something but I'm afraid I need some help from people with more expertise in Office than I have.

My friend wants to install a free trial of Access 2013 on her Windows 7 desktop machine so that she can learn Access since some of the jobs for which she's applying want Access knowledge.

Normally, I'd simply install the Office 30 day trial for her but she has a copy of Office 2010 Student Home and Office which she paid for. It includes a license key. Access is *not* installed from this bundle. Neither of us is sure if Access was never part of that bundle or whether it cost extra to have Access and she was pretty sure she'd never use it so she declined to spend the extra money on it. Whatever the reason, she does not have Access from the bundle.

I see two ways forward here but I'm not sure if there would be problems with either approach.

1. We could install Access 2010 from that bundle if it's still possible.
2. We could install the Office 2013 30 day trial.

Our concern is that either approach may clobber existing work that she has, particular Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

Would EITHER of these approaches endanger any of the documents or spreadsheets she already has? Or does Microsoft compartmentalize each of the programs in Office so that they don't interfere with one another? I have very little knowledge of Office so I don't want to make any assumptions that turn out to be wrong.

Also, does anyone know whether Access 2013 is very different from Access 2010? I'm guessing that if she had reasonably fluency with Access 2010, getting used to Access 2013 would be no big deal, right?

Ranger4 · 12 Jun 2015

As your friend already has a copy of Office 2010 on her computer you could run into problems installing another version of Office. While it can be done it always seems to cause installation problems.

Access can be purchased on it's own & installed & this should not cause any problems.

If she gets proficient using say Access 2010 then shifting to Access 2013 would be a breeze.

The easiest way would be just to purchase Access separately, but as far as I know there are no trial versions of Access, it's buy or nothing.

ignatzatsonic · 12 Jun 2015

RhinoCan said:

I see two ways forward here but I'm not sure if there would be problems with either approach.

1. We could install Access 2010 from that bundle if it's still possible.
2. We could install the Office 2013 30 day trial.

Our concern is that either approach may clobber existing work that she has, particular Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

Would EITHER of these approaches endanger any of the documents or spreadsheets she already has? Or does Microsoft compartmentalize each of the programs in Office so that they don't interfere with one another? I have very little knowledge of Office so I don't want to make any assumptions that turn out to be wrong.

Also, does anyone know whether Access 2013 is very different from Access 2010? I'm guessing that if she had reasonably fluency with Access 2010, getting used to Access 2013 would be no big deal, right?

I have Office 2010 Home and Student. It never had Access. It's been quite a while since Access was included in most Office bundles.

You may be able to install Access from the Office 2013 trial or you may be able to find an Access 2010 trial. I don't know.

As for clobbering other stuff: in my experience MS does "compartmentalize" the individual Office applications so that each is not likely to affect the other.

However, anyone would be a fool to assume that hard drives won't fail in the next 5 minutes and all files will be lost anyway. Prepare for the worst, which means have backups.

I haven't played with Access in 20 years, but I'd be quite surprised if reasonable fluency in Access 2010 was not largely transferable to Access 2013. That's the way it is with Office apps--evolution, not revolution.