Understanding the Office-Outlook uninstall-reinstall process to fix errors
In terms of correcting errors occurring within Outlook, there are times when performing an uninstall/reinstall serves no purpose and is a complete waste of time.
When Office/Outlook is uninstalled using Control Panel, the existing Outlook profiles are not removed and persist. To put this another way, when Office is reinstalled, Outlook will continue to use the existing Outlook profiles.
If the issue being encountered is email account related, then it may well be the result of the default Outlook profile getting corrupted, in which case the solution would be to create a new Outlook profile, configuring the email accounts and setting the newly created profile as the default for the next time Outlook is opened. In this scenario, creating a new Outlook profile is the equivalent of starting as if it was the first time Outlook is being used.
See: How to Start Outlook as a Fresh New Install
However, there certainly are times when either an uninstall/reinstall or Office repair is in order. Some of those cases would include
- errors occurring in specific functions within Outloo
- uninstalling an earlier version of Office after installing a later version (i.e. removing Office ‘2010 after installing ‘2016)
- uninstalling a trial version of Office after installing a purchased version – either by subscription or perpetual license
Best practices
- uninstall any trial version of Office that came with the computer before installing a purchased version
- unless there is any real pressing reason to retain an older version of Office on the computer, this should be removed prior to installing the current version. The Outlook profiles for the older version will not be removed. Office ‘2013/’2016 will migrate the old profiles for use in ‘2013/’2016
- if an older version of Office is uninstalled after the current version is installed, a full repair of the current version of Office should be done. This holds true for virtually any application, not just Office. While no issues may occur it is always safer to completely reset the current version of any program in the event that the uninstall of an older version removes something that is essential for the operation of the current version. Important to remember that when the old version was developed/created, there was no way of knowing what any future version would require.
- when performing a repair of Office, personal preference is to do a complete online repair (when using ‘2013/’2016). It takes much longer then the quick repair but is more complete then a “Quick repair”. If the issue remains after performing a Quick Repair, the only other option is to do a full “online repair” anyways.
To completely uninstall all remnants of Office, the <Fixit> tool can be used instead of manually uninstalling Office via the control panel which is available from
The important thing take away is to know what type of problem you are dealing with before automatically going through an uninstall/reinstall/repair process. Far too often people are going through this exercise not realizing that the issue might be related to information contained (corrupted) in the Outlook profile itself.
In addition to a potential corrupted Outlook profile, issues can arise when data in the underlying data file (PST or OST) has become corrupted in some fashion. In the case of PST files, the first step would be to run ScanPST on the suspect PST file. In the case of an OST file, see How to Fix an Outlook OST file
Category: Understanding Outlook
