How to: Upgrade Office Solutions

If you have a Microsoft Office project that was created in an earlier version of Visual Studio, the project will upgrade automatically when you open it in Visual Studio 2010. After you upgrade the project, it will work just as it did in earlier versions of Visual Studio. 

For more information about the Microsoft Office projects you can upgrade and the specific changes that Visual Studio makes to upgraded projects, see Upgrading and Migrating Office Solutions.

To upgrade a Microsoft Office project

  1. Open an existing project in a version of Visual Studio 2010 that includes the Microsoft Office developer tools. For more information, see Configuring a Computer to Develop Office Solutions.

    The Visual Studio Conversion Wizard appears.

  2. Read the information and warnings on the first screen, and then click Next.

  3. If you want to create a backup of your solution, select Yes, create a backup before converting and specify a location for the backup files. If you do not want to create a backup, select No.

  4. Click Next.

  5. Click Finish if everything on the summary page is correct.

    If you are upgrading a document-level project, the Microsoft Office Document Upgrade Settings dialog box appears.

  6. In the Microsoft Office Document Upgrade Settings dialog box, select the file format that you want to apply to the upgraded document, and then click OK.

    For guidance about how to select a file format, see Introduction to new file name extensions and Office XML Formats.

    Note

    If you select Do not ask me again, the Microsoft Office Document Upgrade Settings dialog box will not appear the next time that you run the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard. Instead, the selected document format is automatically applied to every document-level customization project that you upgrade. To make the Microsoft Office Document Upgrade Settings dialog box reappear when you run the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard, or to change the default document format, see Project Upgrade, Options Dialog Box.

  7. If you want to see details about the conversion status, click Show the conversion log when the wizard is closed.

  8. Click Close.

    The solution opens with the new project system visible in Solution Explorer.

    Note

    If your development computer does not have the .NET Framework 3.5 installed, Visual Studio changes the target framework of the project to the .NET Framework 4. For more information, see Upgrading and Migrating Office Solutions. If this happens, your project will no longer compile if it uses certain features. You must fix the compile errors by modifying code in the project. For more information, see Migrating Office Solutions to the .NET Framework 4.

See Also

Reference

Publish Page, Project Designer (Office Development in Visual Studio)

Other Resources

Upgrading and Migrating Office Solutions

Introducing the Office (2007) Open XML File Formats