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Compatibility in Office 2013

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Summary: Provides a guide to the articles, downloads, scripts, and videos that help IT Professionals assess Office 2013 compatibility.

Audience: IT Professionals

Note

To assess your Office compatibility, we recommend using the Readiness Toolkit for Office add-ins and VBA. The Readiness Toolkit is a free download and can be used to identify the VBA macros and add-ins used in your organization. Also, the Excel-based readiness reports can tell you which add-ins are adopted or supported in Office 365 ProPlus and can provide suggestions on how to remediate VBA macros issues that are identified. For more information, see Use the Readiness Toolkit to assess application compatibility for Office 365 ProPlus.

Content roadmap for IT professionals (banner image)

The following table describes resources that are available to IT Professionals who are assessing Office compatibility.

Office 2013 compatibility roadmap for IT Pros

Getting started

Start here

So you're planning an Office 2013 deployment and you're wondering what's new with compatibility. You may want to know all about the system requirements, changes in Office 2013, and what's new for IT Professionals. Visio 2013 has a new VSDX file format that you'll want to read about. If you're migrating from Office 2003 or Office 2007, you might also want to know what was new in Office 2010, because those features are also in Office 2013.


Thinking about deploying the 64-bit version of Office 2013? We recommend that you deploy the 32-bit version of Office 2013 for most users. If you deploy the 64-bit version, your users might encounter compatibility issues with ActiveX controls, third-party add-ins, and in-house solutions built for 32-bit versions of Office. Be sure to read the deployment considerations for the 64-bit version Office 2013 before you decide.


The compatibility tools are completely new for Office 2013. Say goodbye to OMPM, OEAT, and OCCI and say hello to Telemetry Dashboard and Telemetry Log. Our product team created a helpful blog series to introduce these new compatibility tools. OMPM users can read a comparison of OMPM and Telemetry Dashboard. You can see a high-level view of how the telemetry tools work in our Office Telemetry poster and in Overview of Office Telemetry. And you can see Telemetry Dashboard in action by watching this video on quick tips for Telemetry Dashboard navigation.


Finally, we introduced a new compatibility process that helps you speed up your Office deployments and get users up and running on the new version of Office. Check out the Assess Office 2013 compatibility to learn more about the modern Office compatibility process.
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Deploy and configure Telemetry Dashboard

Before you can start to collect Office inventory and usage data, you must Deploy Telemetry Dashboard. Be sure to review our topology and hardware guidance before you roll out the telemetry components. If you're setting up a small or test environment, we have a script that will quickly set up Telemetry Dashboard on a single computer. You can deploy Telemetry Agents by using your preferred deployment method. This can include deploying Telemetry Agents by using System Center Configuration Manager.


Having trouble getting data into the dashboard? You can troubleshoot Telemetry Dashboard deployments.


If you are concerned about maintaining user privacy for the data that is collected, you can manage privacy settings and see the full list of data that is collected. If, for any reason, you must delete the local telemetry data on a client computer, you can do that, too.


To manage the telemetry database, download the Telemetry Dashboard Administration Tool (Tdadm). You can use this tool to clean up unused user, solution, and computer data, or to copy or move telemetry data to another database. Visit the Tdadm wiki for usage information.
123 steps

Use Telemetry Dashboard

This video about Telemetry Dashboard navigation will help you start Telemetry Dashboard, connect to the database, and view inventory and telemetry data. You can then use Telemetry Dashboard to monitor Office stability and deployment status. You can also use Telemetry Dashboard to manage add-ins in Office 2013. If you aren't sure what the data in a worksheet means, take a look at our reference guide, which describes each worksheet. Want to customize how data telemetry data is displayed in the dashboard? No problem! Creating custom reports in Telemetry Dashboard is easy. Watch this video to see custom reporting in action.


Is your dashboard empty? The agents can require to 4 hours to start transmitting data. You can speed up this process by triggering data collection manually. You might also want to troubleshoot Telemetry Dashboard deployments.
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Troubleshoot Office 2013 documents and custom solutions

Ready to troubleshoot issues with Office documents and custom solutions? You'll want to use Telemetry Log to do this troubleshooting. Telemetry Log displays compatibility issues for Word 2013, Excel 2013, and Outlook 2013. To see how Telemetry Log works, you can download sample Office documents that trigger compatibility events in Telemetry Log.


Telemetry Log also provides a link to the Fix It Center Pro diagnostic tools that collect additional data about the Office application that you are troubleshooting. This data includes relevant log files, registry keys, network configuration, event logs, and other file details that help you troubleshoot Office issues. You can learn more about these diagnostic tools in the Microsoft Fix it Center Pro automated diagnostic portal.
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Reference information

Here are links to tables and other types of reference information.


File formats and extensions

Telemetry Dashboard

Telemetry Agent

Telemetry Log and compatibility events

Group Policy settings
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Scripts

Here are the scripts that can be used with Telemetry Dashboard:

  • Set up Telemetry Dashboard on a single computer  This script automates all required configurations and provides an quick and easy setup of Telemetry Dashboard.

  • Create Group Policy Object for tags (labels) for Telemetry Dashboard  Create-GroupPolicyObjectForTags.ps1 can be used for bulk Group Policy Object (GPO) generation to configure tags (labels) for Telemetry Dashboard. The script creates GPOs that are linked to a specified domain, site, or OU with or without security filtering by security groups.

  • Add tags (labels) for Telemetry Dashboard  Add-Tags.vbs can be used to set tags (labels) for Telemetry Dashboard for Office 2013. The script retrieves properties of a user object from Active Directory and writes registry values for labels, which Telemetry Dashboard can use to filter data.
Downloads

Downloads

Here are the downloads that are related to Office compatibility:
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Videos

Here are the videos that are related to Office compatibility:

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Ask questions and provide feedback

If you have questions about how to use Telemetry Dashboard and Telemetry Log, you can submit your questions in the Office 2013 and Office 365 ProPlus - Planning, Deployment, and Compatibility forum on TechNet. You can also read blog posts about the telemetry tools and leave comments in the Office IT Pro blog.