Export Office 2007 QAT to Office 2010

I was recently migrating a client from an older laptop with Office 2007 to a new laptop with Office 2010 and wanted to even transfer their Quick Access Toolbars (QAT).

Exporting your Quick Access Toolbar from MS Office 2007

So the first issue was determining where MS Office stores such information.  In realitym this is very straight forward.  In MS Office 2007, each application create one or many *.QAT files to store any customization made to the quick access toolbar by the user and these files can be located in:

For Windows XP:
C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office
%systemdrive%\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Office
%AppData%\Microsoft\Office

For Windows Vista and Windows 7
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office
%systemdrive%\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office

Then simply copy and *.QAT files so you can migrate them to your MS Office 2010 installation.

Importing your Quick Access Toolbar into MS Office 2010

The process is once again very simple:

  1. Navigate to the appropriate folder (same as the exporting folder)
  2. Paste the QAT files
  3. Rename each file’s extension from *.QAT to *.officeUI

 The critical step is renaming the files properly!

That’s it, that’s all!