Warning about Repairing Office 365 It Could Uninstall and Remove All Your Outlook Profiles

Warning: Repairing Office 365 Could Uninstall and Remove All Your Outlook Profiles. Just a warning here, folks. If Outlook or other Office Product is causing you issues, then most of us repair Office if that is the only choice. For Outlook, I usually don’t have to do that, but with the latest Outlook 2016 being buggy, I have no choice.

Outlook 2016 is probably the worst version of Outlook out there. Office 2016 has shown some bugs with Excel, but other than that, I don’t get many calls in about Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. Outlook 2016, though, has way too many problems. Microsoft should take it off the installs option until it’s been debugged in my opinion.

Anyway, the point of this blog is dealing with the problems that have come up. It used to be that if you needed to repair Office 2016, you would do so, reboot and things were great. Now, in the past week, I have found that if you repair it, it completely uninstalls Office 2016 and the profiles created in 2016! (This is in the past week only, by the way.)

Outlook 2013 has its own profiles (they work with Outlook 2010 and beyond). After this repair, you might be left with no profiles (and possibly data gone if you had an OST file/IMAP setup) and have to literally start over and reinstall/setup Outlook. I have seen OST files completely delete themselves after you delete a profile. This is not normal.

My last client with this issue, had an Outlook 2013 profile, so all of her data and settings were there because she had upgraded to Outlook 2016. She also had to call Microsoft and they told her that she should not have repaired the Office 365. I did that repair because she was getting too many errors codes! The tech at Microsoft said to use other tools to repair the Office 365, and this makes no sense to me. I also just had a tech buddy in a tech Facebook group confirm the same thing. His “repair” uninstalled Office 365.

My other client had upgraded his Outlook 2016 because the upgrade button was flashing at him. He did that and had problems for a week connecting to Exchange. He just dealt with it until one day his Outlook would not open. I remoted in and found that the upgrade was shot, tried to repair and yep, it was uninstalled! Luckily I had his Microsoft Store account and downgraded him to Outlook 2013. Then, I had to recreate a new profile and do all that work. It was a 1 hour job for me. For others who don’t know what I know, I have no idea how long it would take you or someone not experienced.

I can help if you need me. I do my best but sometimes do have clients call Microsoft because you paid them for this software. I try to have clients call me back after it’s fixed and I can do my fine tuning and optimizing, etc.