My upgrade at work was involuntary and performed by our It people, so I
don't know exactly how it was done or whether it could have been done
better.
I found that most of my Outlook settings did transfer, but Outlook 2003
has many new (IMO) pointless and annoying features that it took me several
days of periodic tinkering to get it to the point where I can live with
it.
I'm not a very heavy Word user, but as far as I can see, all of my Word
preferences, customization, and macros transferred with no problem.
My Excel customizations did NOT transfer. Excel 2000 stores these in a
file named Excel.xlb, while Excel 2000 calls it Excel11.xlb. Instead of
converting or renaming the file, the upgrade process simply put a new
Excel11,xlb in the same folder. I renamed Excel11.xlb to Excel11-old.xlb
and renamed Excel.xlb to Excel11.xlb. That restored all of my
customizations.
To be on the safe side, before Beginning an upgrade, I recommend making a
backup coy of the relevant folders in \Documents and
Settings\{Username}\Microsoft. That would be at least Office and Excel,
and perhaps Word, Outlook, Templates and anything else you may think
relevant. That way if something goes wrong, you have something with which
to attempt a recovery. My experience is that most Office Versions will
recognize and use previous versions of their customization files so long
as they can find them.
