Windows 7 and Outlook compatibility

The following versions of Outlook are fully supported on Windows 7 (32-bit and 64-bit);

• Outlook 2003
• Outlook 2007
• Outlook 2010
• Outlook 2013
• Outlook 2016

It is recommended to always fully update your version of Outlook directly after installing to take care of any incompatibility issues that have been fixed already.

Note: The 64-bit versions of Outlook 2010, Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016 also requires the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

Previous versions

Any other version of Outlook is not supported on Windows 7. Although you could install it, any compatibility issue will not get fixed. For instance;

• Outlook 2002/XP will run on Windows 7 but it has the same password remembering issues as when using it on Windows Vista.
• Outlook 2000 cannot be installed in Internet Mail Only Mode (IMO Mode) and should always be installed in Corporate/Workgroup Mode (CW Mode) to prevent a wab.dll error.

Windows Live Mail

If you do not feel like upgrading to a later Outlook version after upgrading to Windows 7, then you might want to consider Windows Live Mail as a free alternative. It also has Contacts and Calendar support and is fully supported on Windows 7.

If you want to switch to Windows Live Mail on your Windows 7 computer, make sure you install Windows Live Mail on your old computer first and select to import from Outlook. After this, move the message store from Windows Live Mail to your Windows 7 computer and configure Windows Live Mail with it. This is required because Windows Live Mail needs Outlook to be installed in order to import Outlook’s message store.

If you have Windows Mail or Outlook Express installed on your old computer, you can also choose to import Outlook from there. This is because Windows Live Mail on your new computer is also capable of directly importing from Outlook Express and Windows Mail message stores.