Sage 50 has a lot of integration with Office, specifically with Outlook and Excel for email and reporting respectively, but there are a lot of different versions of Office out there and not all will work with Sage 50. So to get the most out of Sage 50 let’s look at which versions of Office are compatible and allow for report and email integration. The fully installed versions of Office 2007, 2010, and 2013 work best with Sage 50 on Windows Vista, 7, and 8. Office 2003 works with Sage 50 on Windows XP, but like Windows XP is technically no longer supported, so an updated version of Office and an operating system that is supported by Microsoft is recommended. Also Office 2003 is not compatible with Windows 8 so if you are still using that it may be time to look into an upgrade (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2777626 ).

There are some versions of Office and Outlook that are incompatible with Sage 50, Office 365 is cloud based and is unable to connect with Sage 50, and Outlook.com (the email site that used to be called Hotmail) is also incompatible as it is not an installed program but a web site. If you use either of these for email you will not be able to email directly from Sage, but you can with a Print to PDF program generate a PDF file from Sage transactions and email that manually.

With all versions of Office that work with Sage they must be installed as a 32 bit program (as opposed to 64 bit). When first installing Office there will be an option for a 32 bit install or 64 bit install, choose the 32 bit option to allow email and reporting integration with Sage 50. If you already have Office installed and want to check whether you are running 32 or 64 bit there are a few ways to do this depending on your version of Office, but you can find instructions on how to do so here (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/what-version-of-office-am-i-using-HA101873769.aspx ). With the full program of Office 2007, 2010, or 2013 installed as 32 bit software you will be able to email from Sage through Outlook and have the ability to export reports into Excel.