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Assess Office compatibility

Article • 05/20/2024
Applies to: Office 2019, Office 2016
） Important
Office Telemetry Dashboard is no longer supported in Microsoft 365 Apps for

enterprise (as of Version 2208), and is removed in Version 2301 (and later).
For more information, see Removal of Office Telemetry Dashboard from
Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise.
Keeping an Office deployment project on track requires two key aspects: using the right
process to assess Office compatibility, and using tools that help you understand the
potential risks of an Office upgrade. Office helps you do both. Using the process
outlined in this article along with Office tools like the Office Telemetry Dashboard can
accelerate your Office deployments, enabling users to transition smoothly to the new
version of Office with minimal disruptions. This article explains the compatibility process
and how the Office Telemetry Dashboard integrates into it.
What is Office Telemetry Dashboard?

The Office Telemetry Dashboard, introduced in Office 2013, is a compatibility monitoring
framework that replaced the Office 2010 compatibility tools: Office Migration Planning
Manager (OMPM), Office Code Compatibility Inspector (OCCI), and Office Environment
Assessment Tool (OEAT). When you use Office Telemetry Dashboard as part of the Office
compatibility process, it helps minimize the time that you spend assessing Office
compatibility. It also reduces the risks associated with an Office upgrade.
Office Telemetry Dashboard works as follows: When an Office document or solution is

loaded, used, closed, or raises an error in certain Office applications, the application
adds a record about the event to a local data store. Each record includes a description of
the problem and a link to more information. Inventory and usage data is also tracked.
How does Office Telemetry Dashboard work in earlier versions of Office? Office
Telemetry Dashboard isn't built into Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010. For those
clients, which are no longer supported, you deploy an agent that collects information
about the installed add-ins and the most recently used documents. Unlike newer Office
clients, you don't receive application event data for these clients; however, you receive
inventory and usage data. This data enables you to identify which applications are in use
and which are likely important to your business.
） Important
Office Telemetry Dashboard is an on-premises tool that collects inventory,

usage, and health data about the Office documents and solutions, such as
add-ins, used in your organization. The data is primarily designed to help your
organization with application compatibility testing.
Data collected for Office Telemetry Dashboard is stored in a SQL Server
database controlled by your organization and the data collected is not sent to
Microsoft. For more information, see Data collected by the agent for Office
Telemetry Dashboard.
Data collected for Office Telemetry Dashboard is different than Office
diagnostic data, which can be sent to Microsoft. For more information about
Office diagnostic data, see Overview of privacy controls for Microsoft 365
Apps.
Settings used to manage Office Telemetry Dashboard have no impact on
Office diagnostic data and vice versa. For more information about managing
Office diagnostic data, see Use policy settings to manage privacy controls
for Microsoft 365 Apps.
The Office compatibility process

The Office compatibility tools address common issues that can make Office
deployments difficult. These tools help by speeding up deployments, reducing the
unknown factors in your deployment through reporting, and laying a foundation for
future Office upgrades. For the best results, use the built-in compatibility infrastructure
of Office and use a phased approach to assess Office compatibility.
Phases of the Office compatibility process
ﾉ Expand table
Phase Description
Discover what is being used, by whom, and how often. This information helps you
determine what to test for compatibility with the version of Office you're upgrading.
Phase Description
Documents and solutions that are used frequently and by multiple users are good
candidates for testing.
Partner with business groups to identify what's critical to the business. The data that
you find during the discovery phase can help jumpstart and guide this discussion. The
goal is to identify the business-critical documents and solutions that have to be ready
on the first day of your Office deployment.
Start a pilot deployment where users test the documents and solutions that are
required to run the business by using Office. We call this user acceptance testing.
Troubleshoot any issues that occur for documents and solutions that need to be ready
on the first day of deployment.
Deploy Office and continue to monitor your documents and solutions. Watch for
trends in Office performance and behavior as updated Office solutions are deployed.
Use your Help Desk resources to troubleshoot issues as they occur for non-business-
critical documents and solutions.
In this article, we discuss each phase of the compatibility process and describe how you
can use Office Telemetry Dashboard to support the process.
Phase 1: Discover which Office documents and

solutions are being used
Your goal for the Discover phase is to know what's being used the most and by whom.
There are two approaches that you can take to start the discovery process.
The preferred approach is to start to deploy the Office Telemetry Agent to help
you discover usage within monitored groups and then use those results to begin
discussions with business groups.
Consider partnering with your business groups and requesting a list of their
business-critical documents and solutions. If they have a disaster recovery plan,
you can likely find this list in their plan. The downside to this approach is that their
lists might not be up-to-date. You should plan to use data to help refine these lists
if you choose this approach.
Whether or not you start with a blank list, there's no avoiding working with your
business groups. The tools can't tell you what's important to the business. The tools can
give you some leads on what's important based on use, but only the business groups
can tell you how dependent their business is on those documents and solutions. For
example, relying solely on data can lead to oversights. You might miss templates for
year-end sales reports or annual performance reviews. Other documents not in use at
the time of data collection could also be overlooked.
Now it's time to start to make plans to deploy the agent to the existing Office clients.
Here are some considerations to think about before you deploy the agent. Here are the
requirements to deploy the agent in Office Telemetry Agent. For more information on
deploying Office Telemetry Dashboard, see Deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Choose which Office client computers to monitor

We recommend that you monitor about 20% of the client computers across your
organization. This sample should include representative users from every business
group so that you can identify line-of-business solutions that are used within pockets of
the organization. Make sure to include expert users in that sample and users who
express interest in piloting Office. There might be cases in which monitoring a complete
group or organizational unit (OU) is less restrictive or easier than selecting separate
client computers to participate. Small organizations might also choose to monitor all
client computers.
Identify privacy concerns with business group

stakeholders
Some business groups, such as human resources, legal, and finance, might have
concerns about exposing personal or sensitive files in the data. Office Telemetry
Dashboard offers several ways to prevent exposing this data. For example, you can
configure the agent to intentionally obscure file names and titles. You can also prevent
data from certain applications from being reported. You can learn more about the
privacy settings in Manage the privacy of data monitored by Office Telemetry
Dashboard. Review the privacy options with the business groups and decide which kinds
of Office data that you want to exclude from reporting in Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Decide how you want to categorize clients that are shown

in Office Telemetry Dashboard
When you deploy the agent to clients, you can specify up to four labels that describe
the clients. These labels help you filter data in the dashboard so that you can focus on
individual business groups, specific kinds of users, users in certain geographical
locations, and so on. Develop this list as you work with business groups. You can learn
more about how to configure labels when you Deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard, in
the section Enabling and configuring the agent.
Phase 2: Rationalize the inventory data to
identify business-critical Office documents and
solutions
The goal of the Rationalize phase is to identify business-critical Office documents and
solutions. We recommend that you collect data in Office Telemetry Dashboard for at
least one day before you start to look for trends.
The sections that follow helps you interpret the data, work with business groups, and
decide what to test.
Gain insights from data in Office Telemetry Dashboard

As data starts to populate in Office Telemetry Dashboard, you can start to look for usage
trends. Here are some tips to get you started.
Look to see whether any departments or groups aren't represented but should be.
For example, if there are no finance solutions being used, you might forget to
enable monitoring for the finance group.
Look for documents and solutions that are used by more than 10% of user as
they're candidates for more evaluation.
Look for documents that are used by three or more users. Is there a trend for
coauthoring? Are these templates? You might find that fewer documents are
shared than solutions.
Jot down solutions that you know are important that you'll want to track in the
future even if the user numbers are low.
Look to see where documents were opened from. This information can help you
differentiate between an attachment in an email message and a frequently edited
document.
Look for multiple file sizes of the same solution or document. It's an indication that
multiple versions are being used. These files are candidates for future
consolidation.
Work with business groups to decide what Office

documents and solutions to test
By now, you likely worked with business groups to identify their important documents
and solutions. Compare the list they gave you with the usage data shown in the Office
Telemetry Dashboard. Does the usage data support the input from the business groups?
If not, could there be a seasonal explanation? For example, are some solutions used
more towards the end of the fiscal year? It's worth having another conversation with
business groups about any differences you find so that you can adjust your plans for
user acceptance testing.
If you haven't worked with business groups yet, this is the time to approach them. The
initial usage data can help you create a list of documents and solutions that are
candidates for testing and remediation. But instead of assigning priority levels, such as
high, medium, or low, it's better to rank documents and solutions by the type of testing
they undergo. Ask your business groups to assign them to one of the choices in the
following table:
Classifying Office documents and solutions to test
ﾉ Expand table
Type of documents and solutions Testing needed
Documents and solutions that IT is Proactive testing

accountable for and must keep These high-priority documents and solutions are
functioning at all costs tested, fixed, and ready for use on the first day of the
Office deployment.
Documents and solutions that IT fix if Reactive testing

somebody calls about them These solutions are fixed only when a user reports an
issue to your help desk.
Documents and solutions that nobody Don't test

cares about
When you approach business groups to classify their documents and solutions, you
might meet some resistance from business groups that assign everything to the high
priority list. One of our Office compatibility experts, Chris Jackson, wrote an article for
TechNet Magazine that describes some costs behind Office compatibility testing. You
can use this information to help justify reactive testing and ease the emotional fears that
often affect Office migrations. Read more at Microsoft Office: The Mathematics of Office
Compatibility.
Phase 3: Validate that Office files and solutions

work
After you complete the Discover and Rationalize phases, it's time to start to test the high
priority documents and solutions for compatibility with Office. The goal of the Validate
phase is to verify that the solutions and documents work in the environment that users
need them to work in. This doesn't mean that the solution or document doesn't have
bugs. It just means that the bugs don't prevent users from doing their work.
Unfortunately, there's no tool that does this work for you. You have to ask users to test
the documents and solutions by doing their work in Office. We call this user acceptance
testing, and it's unavoidable. The good news is that user acceptance testing is much
easier now with Click-to-Run, which helps transform user acceptance testing into
piloting. Encourage users to use their documents and solutions in the new version of
Office, and advise them to use their earlier version of Office if they encounter issues.
Data in Office Telemetry Dashboard is also a significant help in this phase because it can
tell you what is broken and how. Office Telemetry Dashboard shows positive and
negative trends that can help you quickly see the stability of documents or solutions as
they're updated.
Here are some guidelines to help you plan and monitor user acceptance testing.
Identify users for user acceptance testing

Owners of the business-critical documents and solutions are strong candidates for
taking part in user acceptance testing. By looking at the list that you generated during
discovery, each department can identify the owners. If not, data can help by showing
you most active users.
You should also recruit technical users within each department, because they're likely to
know the details of how the solution or document works. Also look for a diverse base of
testers across job levels, roles, and locations.
Set up an environment for user acceptance testing

One important rule of user acceptance testing is that the test environment must be as
similar to the production environment as possible. There are several ways to set up a
test environment. You can set up a separate organizational unit (OU) within the
production domain, or set up a separate test environment that is identical to the
production environment. You want the test environment to be easy to set up and easy
for users to access. The goal is to remove barriers to testing and to minimize complaints
from users who say that there's no time to test. Your organization might already have a
testing environment provisioned and centrally managed. If so, use it. If you don't have a
test environment already, don't set one up. Use Click-to-Run instead.
Click-to-Run provides all the benefits of testing in production without all the risk.
Installing Office by using Click-to-Run allows users to run their earlier versions of Office
alongside the current version of Office. If a problem or incompatibility arises, users can
still do their work by using the earlier version of Office.
It's easier to transform user acceptance testing into piloting when you use Click-to-Run.
You deploy the new environment while keeping the previous one, and you can monitor
the status of the Click-to-Run deployments of Office by using Office Telemetry
Dashboard. You can see which builds are being used and the compatibility issues that
are being reported. Monitoring user acceptance testing and piloting by using Office
Telemetry Dashboard helps ease the fear of not knowing the effect of the new version.
You can offer more information to business groups and Office solution owners beyond
just status of the deployment.
） Important
We recommend that you use side-by-side installations of Office as a temporary

solution for user acceptance testing and piloting, not as a long-term solution for
production environments. Plan to phase out the earlier version of Office when your
production deployments begin.
Fix issues in high priority Office documents and solutions

By now, high priority documents and solutions that have to be ready on day one of
deployment are identified and tested. In addition to bug reports from users, data in
Office Telemetry Dashboard indicates how Word, Excel, and Microsoft Outlook perform
when used with your existing Office documents and solutions. As you collect
information about bugs and other issues, work with in-house developers and business
group managers to create remediation plans. You need to decide whether to retire or fix
in-house solutions and work with vendors to obtain updated versions of non-Microsoft
products.
Both Office Telemetry Dashboard and Office Telemetry Log can help you during this
process. You can monitor the health of Word, Excel, and Microsoft Outlook as you
deploy incremental fixes or new versions of Office solutions. Developers can use the
Office Telemetry Log to observe the compatibility events that occur on the local
computer when Word, Excel, and Microsoft Outlook are used with existing documents
and solutions.
Your development teams might have automated testing tools that can help with the
testing process. Tune the tools to flag and fix only issues that block deployment,
ensuring readiness on the first day. It's probably not worth fixing bugs that don't affect
the user's day-to-day work, at least not for day one. Those solutions can be fixed over
time if it's necessary.
７ Note
You may wonder whether it's a good idea to substitute vendor support statements
with compatibility testing. Chris Jackson covers the cost pros and cons of
researching vendor support in his article Microsoft Office: The Mathematics of
Office Compatibility.
Phase 4: Manage the transition to the new

version of Office
Your goals for the Manage phase are to use Office Telemetry Dashboard to monitor
Office usage and add-ins and prepare users for the transition to Office. Set compatibility
mode for Office to ensure that people using earlier versions have full editing capabilities
when collaborating with users who have transitioned to the new version.
As you deploy Office, you'll start to see Office health and usage trends that help you
unlock the value of your Office investments and give you insight for future deployments.
For example, knowing what ActiveX controls are being used can help with future
Windows updates. Is Excel being used not just as a spreadsheet tool, but as a front-end
application that uses a data connection? How do new Office solutions affect the
environment? When it's time for another Office deployment, you might be able to skip
the discovery process entirely because you know exactly what's being used and what's
important.
These sections provide more guidance about the Manage phase.
Manage Office add-ins by using Office Telemetry

Dashboard
As you monitor solutions that are used by Office, you're likely to find add-ins that are
slow to load or that crash frequently. You might also find add-ins that shouldn't be used
in your organization. Group Policy settings allow you to manage these add-ins when
they're used with Office.
Office Telemetry Dashboard provides an interface for configuring these settings. On the
Solutions worksheet, select the Add-in management link at the top of the page, which
brings you to the Add-in management worksheet. On that worksheet, you can see data
about each add-in and select a Group Policy setting to control each add-in. Use the
instructions on the worksheet to generate a script that you can run to apply the Group
Policy to an Active Directory organizational unit.
There are individual add-in management settings for each supported Office application.
They're located in the following paths:
User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Office application

name\Miscellaneous\List of managed add-ins
User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Office application

name\Miscellaneous\Block all unmanaged add-ins
Phase out earlier versions of Office

We recommend that you run a newer version of Office with an earlier version of Office
side-by-side only as a short-term compatibility solution during pilot testing. When your
pilot phase ends and production deployments begin, start removing earlier versions of
Office from production computers running the newer version. This step prevents
widespread issues caused by file type associations breaking after updates or repairs.
Manage compatibility mode in Office

In Office, compatibility mode is used automatically to open documents that were
created in earlier versions of Office applications. Compatibility mode blocks new or
improved Office features for the document, ensuring users with earlier Office versions
still have full editing capabilities. Compatibility mode also preserves the document's
layout.
As part of your overall Office training plan, you should provide guidance to users about
how compatibility mode works. For more information on administrative settings for
compatibility mode, see Manage compatibility mode for Office.
Prepare help desk and users for change

Your Help Desk should be ramped up on Office and ready to support users. They should
start by going to Microsoft 365 Training .
Related articles
Guide to Office Telemetry Dashboard resources
Deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard
Manage the privacy of data monitored by Office Telemetry Dashboard
Let's manage add-ins using Telemetry Dashboard
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Guide to Office Telemetry Dashboard
resources
Article • 03/01/2023
） Important

The following table describes resources that are available to IT Professionals who are
assessing Office compatibility by using the Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Area More information
Start here Read Assess Office compatibility to learn about the four key phases in the
compatibility process.
Thinking about deploying the 64-bit version of Office? Be sure to carefully review
Choose between the 64-bit or 32-bit version of Office before you decide.
Deploy and Before you can start to collect Office inventory, usage, and health data, you must
configure Deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard. Be sure to review our topology and hardware
Office guidance before you roll out the components. If you're setting up a small or test
Telemetry environment, we have a script that will quickly set up Office Telemetry Dashboard
Dashboard on a single computer. You can deploy agents by using your preferred deployment
method. This can include deploying agents by using Microsoft Configuration
Manager.
You'll need to update the Office Telemetry Dashboard components if you're

moving from an Office 2013 installation of Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Having trouble getting data into the dashboard? You can troubleshoot Office
Telemetry Dashboard deployments.
If you're concerned about maintaining user privacy for the data that is collected,
you can manage privacy settings and see the list of data that is collected. If, for
any reason, you must delete the local data on a client computer, you can do that,
too.
To manage the database, download the Telemetry Dashboard Administration Tool

(Tdadm) . You can use this tool to clean up unused user, solution, and computer
data, or to copy or move data to another database. Visit the Tdadm wiki for
usage information.
IMPORTANT:
- Office Telemetry Dashboard is an on-premises tool that collects inventory,
usage, and health data about the Office documents and solutions, such as add-
ins, used in your organization. The data is primarily designed to help your
- Data collected for Office Telemetry Dashboard is stored in a SQL Server
database controlled by your organization and is not sent to Microsoft. For more
information, see Data collected by the agent for Office Telemetry Dashboard.
- Data collected for Office Telemetry Dashboard is different than Office diagnostic
data, which can be sent to Microsoft. For more information about Office
diagnostic data, see Overview of privacy controls for Microsoft 365 Apps.
- Settings used to manage Office Telemetry Dashboard have no impact on Office
diagnostic data and vice versa. For more information about managing Office
diagnostic data, see Use policy settings to manage privacy controls for Microsoft
365 Apps.
Use Office This video about Office Telemetry Dashboard navigation will help you start
Telemetry Office Telemetry Dashboard, connect to the database, and view the data
Dashboard collected. You can then use Office Telemetry Dashboard to monitor Office stability
and deployment status. You can also use Office Telemetry Dashboard to manage
add-ins in Office. If you aren't sure what the data in a worksheet means, take a
look at our reference guide, which describes each worksheet. Want to customize
how data is displayed in the dashboard? No problem! Creating custom reports in
Office Telemetry Dashboard is easy. Watch this video to see custom reporting
in action.
(Although these videos are for an earlier version of Office, the information also
applies to newer versions of Office.)
Is your dashboard empty? The agents can require to four hours to start
transmitting data. You can speed up this process by triggering data collection
manually. You might also want to troubleshoot Office Telemetry Dashboard
deployments.
Troubleshoot Ready to troubleshoot issues with Office documents and custom solutions? You'll
Office want to use Office Telemetry Log to do this troubleshooting. The log displays
documents compatibility issues for Word, Excel, and Outlook. To see how the log works, you
and custom can download sample Office documents that trigger compatibility events in the
solutions log.
Reference Here are links to tables and other types of reference information.
information
File formats and extensions
- File format reference for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

- XML file name extension reference for Office
Office Telemetry Dashboard, agent, and other components
- Office Telemetry Dashboard worksheets

- Registry settings and Group Policy settings for the agent
- Data that the agent collects
- Custom reporting and database schema reference for Office Telemetry
Dashboard
- Document and solution types monitored by Office Telemetry Dashboard
Office Telemetry Log
- Types of Office files and solutions tracked in Office Telemetry Log

- Types of events displayed in Office Telemetry Log
Compatibility issues in Office Telemetry Log
- Controls
- Removed and deprecated members in the object model
- Behavior changes in the object model
- Hidden members in the object model
Scripts Here are the scripts that can be used with Office Telemetry Dashboard:
- Set up Office Telemetry Dashboard on a single computer This script automates

all required configurations and provides a quick and easy setup of Office
- Create Group Policy Object for tags (labels) for Telemetry Dashboard Create-
GroupPolicyObjectForTags.ps1 can be used for bulk Group Policy Object (GPO)
generation to configure tags (labels) for Office Telemetry Dashboard. The script
creates GPOs that are linked to a specified domain, site, or OU with or without
security filtering by security groups.
- Add tags (labels) for Telemetry Dashboard Add-Tags.vbs can be used to set tags
(labels) for Office Telemetry Dashboard. The script retrieves properties of a user
object from Active Directory and writes registry values for labels, which Office
Telemetry Dashboard can use to filter data. The script was written for Office 2013
but you can modify it to work with newer versions of Office.
Downloads Here are the downloads that are related to Office compatibility:
- Telemetry Dashboard Administration Tool download and wiki

- Sample Office documents that trigger compatibility events in Office Telemetry
Log
- Visio 2016 Viewer
- Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Group Policy
- Telemetry in Office 2013: A new way to assess Office compatibility (poster*)
*Although the poster is for an earlier version of Office, the information also applies
to newer versions of Office.
Videos Watch videos that are related to Office compatibility:
- Quick tips for Office Telemetry Dashboard navigation

- Creating custom reports in Office Telemetry Dashboard
Although these videos are for an earlier version of Office, the information also
applies to newer versions of Office.
Plan a deployment of Office Telemetry
Dashboard
Article • 05/22/2024
） Important

When you deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard, you must consider several factors. These
can include the location of the users to be monitored and the hardware specifications of
the computer that runs the processor and other components that deliver the data to
Office Telemetry Dashboard. It's also important to understand the supported limits for
Office Telemetry Dashboard deployments, such as the maximum number of users who
can be monitored. Use the guidance in this article to help you design an Office
Telemetry Dashboard topology that is sized appropriately for your organization.
Introducing Office Telemetry Dashboard

Office Telemetry Dashboard is an Excel workbook that displays compatibility and
inventory, usage, and health data about the Office files, Office add-ins, and Office
solutions that are used in an organization. For a visual representation of the
components used to support Office Telemetry Dashboard and how they work, download
this poster , which includes a description of all components, a list of what Office files
are monitored, how data collection works, and more. Although the poster is for an
earlier version of Office, the information also applies to newer versions of Office.
） Important

Apps.
Before you begin planning an Office Telemetry

Dashboard deployment
Ensure that you have reviewed the content in Assess Office compatibility. This article
introduces you to the compatibility process you use with Office Telemetry Dashboard to
gather data for Office deployment.
As you review this article, be aware that the recommendations assume that the
following statements are true for your organization:
Agents upload data every 8 hours, which is the default setting.
Each user has a single computer that runs an agent.
If these statements are not true for your organization, plan to adjust your topology
accordingly.
Office Telemetry Dashboard components

The following table describes the tools and components for Office Telemetry Dashboard:
ﾉ Expand table
Tool Description
Office Telemetry Dashboard:
- Shows IT Pros a combined view of inventory, usage, and health data

- Is installed with Office Professional Plus 2019, Office Professional Plus 2016, or
Office Standard 2016.
- Requires Excel installed from Office 2019 or Office 2016.
- Connects to the database
- Can be viewed by multiple IT Pros
Office Telemetry Log:
- Helps developers and experienced users diagnose compatibility issues that occur
on an Office client
- Is installed with Office Professional Plus 2019, Office Professional Plus 2016, or
Office Standard 2016.
- Requires Excel installed from Office 2019 or Office 2016.
- Connects to the local data store on the client computer
The following table describes the components of Office Telemetry Dashboard. The first
two components shown below are required for both Office Telemetry Log and Office
Telemetry Dashboard. The remaining components that are listed are applicable only to
Office Telemetry Dashboard. These components collect data from across an organization
so that you can view it by using Office Telemetry Dashboard. To learn how to deploy
these components, see Deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard.
ﾉ Expand table
Component Description
Office Telemetry Log:
- Monitors events for (and is built into) Office 2019 and Office 2016 versions of
Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
- Is disabled by default.
- Is enabled by using Group Policy, registry settings, or by selecting the Enable
Logging button in Office Telemetry Log.
- The resulting data can be viewed on the local computer by using Office Telemetry
Log.
Office Telemetry Agent:
- Reports usage and inventory data for all Office clients.

- Reports application event data for Office clients.
- Must be deployed to Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010 clients. (These
versions of Office are no longer supported.)
- Is built into Office 2019 and Office 2016 clients.
Component Description
- Must be enabled using Group Policy or the registry.

- Runs as a scheduled task.
- Requires domain membership.
- Periodically uploads data to a shared folder.
- Requires the latest version of the Universal C Runtime (CRT). For more
information, see Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows .
Group Policy settings:
- Enable and configure the agent on each client.

- Are part of Office16.admx and Office16.adml.
- Are located under User Configuration\Policies\Administrative
Templates\Microsoft Office 2016\Telemetry Dashboard.
- Can be downloaded from the Microsoft Download Center .
Shared folder:
- Stores data that is uploaded by agents.

- Must be on premises (no cloud support).
- Can be located on the same computer as other components.
- Is configured when you install the processor.
Office Telemetry Processor:
- Uploads data from the shared folder to the database.

- Runs as a Windows service named "Office Telemetry Processor."
- Is supported on Windows Server 2012 and later versions.
- Can be run on Windows 10 or Windows 11 in test or small environments.
- Can be run on the same computer as other components.
- Can be installed on multiple computers for large deployments.
- Requires domain membership unless a workaround is used.
- Requires the latest version of the Universal C Runtime (CRT). For more
information, see Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows .
- Supports Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2
Database:
- Provides a data source for Office Telemetry Dashboard.

- Requires SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012,
SQL Server 2014, or SQL Server 2016.
- Can be run on SQL Express editions in test or small environments.
- Can be run on the same computer as other components.
To check which versions of SQL Server are currently supported, go to Search

Product and Services Lifecycle Information.
How data is collected

The following table describes and illustrates how data collection is triggered and the
flow of data between the agents and Office Telemetry Dashboard. You can view a more
detailed diagram in this downloadable poster . Although the poster is for an earlier
version of Office, the information also applies to newer versions of Office.
Steps in the data collection process
ﾉ Expand table
Step Description
Users log on and trigger the Users log on and trigger the scheduled task that uploads
agent scheduled task data. The agent waits 10 minutes for logon processes to
complete, and then the agent waits for a random number of
minutes, up to 4 hours, before it starts the upload process.
After the initial upload, the agent uploads data every 8 hours.
Mobile or offline clients upload data when users log on when
the connection is restored.
To learn how to configure the upload interval for agents, see

Enabling and configuring the agent.
Agents send data to the shared In this image, agents for all versions of Office collect the
folder following data to upload to the shared folder:
- Most recently used documents

- Registered add-ins
- System and user information
Agents for Office 2019 and Office 2016 also collect the
following data for certain Office applications:
- Application events
- Add-in performance
Here are the approximate data upload sizes (in KB) for
agents. These sizes can vary.
- Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010: 50 KB per

upload
- Office 2013 or later: 64 KB per upload
To learn more about the kinds of data that are uploaded and
how to manage user privacy for this data, see Manage the
privacy of data monitored by Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Data is processed to the After the agents upload data to the shared folder, the
database processor imports the data to the database.
Step Description
The shared folder, the processor, and database can run on

the same computer or on different computers.
IT Pros access data by using IT Pros who are granted permissions to the database can use
Office Telemetry Dashboard Office Telemetry Dashboard to view the combined data. To
learn more, see To grant other administrators permission to
access the database.
Planning labels for agents

The agent collects inventory, usage, and health data and uploads it to a shared folder.
To help you filter and organize this data when it is displayed in Office Telemetry
Dashboard, you can assign up to four custom labels for each agent to describe the client
computer's physical location, the user's business group, user role, or other identifier.
This helps you analyze data for specific business groups, types of users, or any other
designation that you choose. Use the following resources to help you plan the labels
that you want to use before you deploy and enable the agents:
Deploying labels (tags) for better analysis in Office Telemetry Dashboard describes
how labels appear in Office Telemetry Dashboard. The blog post also describes
three methods for populating the labels. For Office 2019 and Office 2016, use
Group Policy and set labels based on your Active Directory structure. The scripts
mentioned in the blog, Create-GroupPolicyObjectForTags.ps1 and Add-Tags.vbs,
do not work with Office 2019 and Office 2016.
The "Custom reporting in Office Telemetry Dashboard" video demonstrates how

labels are used in custom reports. This may give you some additional ideas on
which labels to choose.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/ed8327e4-c063-40f5-a634-
230c067d73b4?autoplay=false&postJsllMsg=true
Although this video is for an earlier version of Office, the information also applies to newer
versions of Office.
Topology requirements for Office Telemetry

Dashboard deployments
At a minimum, Office Telemetry Dashboard requires one database and one processor
and shared folder pair. These can be hosted on the same computer, as shown in the
following figure. You can use the computer for other purposes besides hosting Office
Telemetry Dashboard components.
Minimum topology requirements for Office Telemetry Dashboard
Two additional requirements apply to the processor and shared folder pairs:
A processor must always have a dedicated shared folder. A shared folder can't be
used by multiple processors.
You can have multiple processors and shared folder pairs, but each pair must be
stored on a separate computer. The next section, Supported limits for Office
Telemetry Dashboard components, describes the numbers of pairs that you can
create in an Office Telemetry Dashboard topology.
Supported limits for Office Telemetry

Dashboard components
For best performance, we recommend that your Office Telemetry Dashboard topology
does not exceed the limits that are described in the following table.
Supported limits for Office Telemetry Dashboard components
ﾉ Expand table
Supported limits for a database Supported limits for each

processor and shared
folder pair
- Host data for up to 100,000 users. Process data for up to

- Host up to ten processor and shared folder pairs. 50,000 users.
- Host up to 30 users of Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Supported limits for a database Supported limits for each
processor and shared
folder pair
Hosting of more than 30 users is supported but, when multiple

users try to connect to the database at the same time, database
performance may decrease temporarily.
Here is a figure that shows a production topology that is configured within the
supported limits. Each processor and shared folder pair has fewer than 50,000 users and
this topology already has the maximum of 100,000 users for the database. Three
computers host components in this example.
Production topology for Office Telemetry Dashboard
Topology and bandwidth recommendations for

Office Telemetry Dashboard deployments
If your organization has users who are in multiple geographic locations, make sure that
you follow these guidelines when you decide where you want to deploy the Office
Telemetry Dashboard components.
We recommend that you host the Office Telemetry Dashboard components (the
dashboard, database, processor, shared folder, and agents) on a network that has
bandwidth of 1.5 Mbps (T1) or more, with latencies no greater than 150 ms.
Deploy each processor and shared folder pair as close as possible, ideally on the
same computer.
If you only need one processor and shared folder pair, run the database, processor,
and shared folder on the same computer to avoid any bottlenecks that are caused
by transferring data over the network.
If you must have multiple processor and shared folder pairs, run one processor on
the same computer as the database. Run other processors on separate computers.
For a database that hosts more than 10,000 users, consider the following
recommendations, in addition to general performance recommendations for SQL Server:
For the best performance, deploy SQL Server on a dedicated computer that is not
hosting databases for any other application.
For the best performance, place the tempdb, database, and SQL transaction logs
on separate physical hard disks.
Ensure that the SQL I/O channels to the disks are not shared by other applications,
such as the paging file and Internet Information Services (IIS) logs.
Scaling out Office Telemetry Dashboard

deployments
We recommend that you start with a single dedicated computer that is running the
database, processor and shared folder pair, and then scale out the topology by adding
more computers that host processor and shared folder pairs. We recommend that you
add a new processor and shared folder pair if you do either of the following:
Collect data from more than 50,000 users.
Collect data from remote sites. We recommend that you install the processor and
shared folder pair as close to the agents on the client computers as possible.
Hardware recommendations for Office
Telemetry Dashboard deployments
The following table describes hardware recommendations for Office Telemetry
Dashboard deployments.
Hardware recommendations for the computer that hosts the database
ﾉ Expand table
Monitored users and monitored duration RAM Disk space Processor
100 users for 3 months (evaluation) 4 GB** 81 MB 1 Ghz or faster
10,000 users for 1 year 8 GB** 14 GB 2 GHz or faster
100,000 users for 1 year 32 GB** 107 GB 2 GHz or faster
*Includes inventory and events for earlier versions of Office and for Office 2019 and
Office 2016.
**The recommended RAM value is greater than the one recommended as the minimum
values for SQL Server because of the distribution of data required for an Office
Telemetry Dashboard environment.
The following table describes hardware recommendations for each computer that hosts
a processor and shared folder pair.
Hardware recommendations for each computer that hosts a processor and shared
folder pair
ﾉ Expand table
Monitored users and monitored duration RAM Disk space Processor
Any 4 GB 11 GB 1 Ghz or faster
*Includes inventory and events for both earlier versions of Office and for Office 2019
and Office 2016.
Related topics
Feedback

Article • 03/01/2023
） Important

For more information, see Removal of Office Telemetry Dashboard from Microsoft
365 Apps for enterprise.
This article helps you deploy the five components of Office Telemetry Dashboard: the
dashboard itself, the processor, the agent, the database, and a shared folder. Ensure that you
review Plan a deployment of Office Telemetry Dashboard for topology, scalability, and
hardware guidance before you deploy these components.
） Important
Office Telemetry Dashboard is an on-premises tool that collects inventory, usage,

and health data about the Office documents and solutions, such as add-ins, used in
your organization. The data is primarily designed to help your organization with
application compatibility testing.
Data collected for Office Telemetry Dashboard is stored in a SQL Server database
controlled by your organization and the data collected is not sent to Microsoft. For
more information, see Data collected by the agent for Office Telemetry
Dashboard.
Data collected for Office Telemetry Dashboard is different than Office diagnostic
data, which can be sent to Microsoft. For more information about Office diagnostic
data, see Overview of privacy controls for Microsoft 365 Apps.
Settings used to manage Office Telemetry Dashboard have no impact on Office
diagnostic data and vice versa. For more information about managing Office
diagnostic data, see Use policy settings to manage privacy controls for Microsoft
365 Apps.
Office Telemetry Dashboard

Office Telemetry Dashboard is an Excel workbook that is configured to connect to a database.
Office Telemetry Dashboard is installed together with Office Professional Plus 2019, Office
Professional Plus 2016, or Office Standard 2016. To view Office Telemetry Dashboard, you must
have Excel installed from Office 2019 or Office 2016.
After Office is installed, you can start Office Telemetry Dashboard by using one of the
procedures in the following table:
How to start Office Telemetry Dashboard
Operating system How to start Office Telemetry Dashboard
Windows 10, Windows From the Start menu, choose All Programs, then Microsoft Office 2016
Server 2008 R2, or Windows Tools, then Telemetry Dashboard for Office 2016.
7 with Service Pack 1
Windows 8.1 On the Start screen, type Telemetry Dashboard and then choose it from
the search results.
Windows Server 2012 R2 or Swipe in from the right edge to show the charms and then choose Search
Windows Server 2012 to see all the apps that are installed on the computer. Next, choose
Telemetry Dashboard for Office 2016.
For Office 2019, look for Telemetry Dashboard for Office under Microsoft Office Tools.
７ Note
Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 ended on January 14, 2020.
Support for Windows 8.1 ended on January 10, 2023.
SQL Server
SQL Server must be deployed before you can configure Office Telemetry Dashboard. You don't
have to have an existing database, but you do have to install or have access to one of these
versions of SQL Server:
SQL Server 2016 or SQL Server 2016 Express
SQL Server 2008 R2 or SQL Server 2008 R2 Express Edition
SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
SQL Server 2005 or SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

７ Note
To check which versions of SQL Server are currently supported, go to Search Product and
Services Lifecycle Information page.
The Getting started worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard provides a link to download
SQL Server 2014 Express. If you don't have SQL Server already installed, follow the steps in To
download and install SQL Server 2014 Express. Be sure to review the following guidelines
before you install SQL Server 2014 Express.
Ensure that the computer meets the hardware and software requirements for SQL Server
2014. This is especially important if you are planning an all-in-one configuration for
testing because SQL Server has additional requirements, such as installing Windows
service packs that aren't required for Office Telemetry Dashboard. These requirements
are described in Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server 2014.
For local installations, you must run Setup as an administrator. If you install SQL Server
from a remote shared folder, you must use a domain account that has read and execute
permissions on the remote shared folder. For more information, see Install SQL Server
2014 from the Installation Wizard (Setup).
To download and install SQL Server 2014 Express

1. In Office Telemetry Dashboard, on the Getting started worksheet, under 1. Set up
prerequisites, choose the link to download and install SQL Server 2014 Express with
Tools. Choose the 32-bit or 64-bit edition, as appropriate. Or use this link: Microsoft SQL
Server 2014 Express .
2. The setup process for SQL Server 2014 Express takes a while to download and extract
files. Accept the various prompts and wait for the first page of SQL Server 2014 Express,
which is named the SQL Server Installation Center, to appear after extraction is
completed. Then, follow these steps:
a. In the SQL Server Installation Center, choose New SQL Server stand-alone installation
or add features to an existing installation.
b. In the SQL Server 2014 setup wizard, read the license terms, accept them, and then
choose Next.
c. On the Feature Selection page, accept the default settings. Choose Next.
d. On the Instance Configuration page, create a named instance (for example, use the
name "teledash"). Choose Next.
e. On the Server Configuration page, accept default service accounts. Choose Next.
f. On the Database Engine Configuration page, accept the default authentication mode
(Windows authentication mode). Your user account is displayed as a SQL Server
administrator. (Warning: Don't use Mixed Mode because Office Telemetry Dashboard
doesn't support SQL Server authentication.) Choose Next.
g. On the Error Reporting page, select the check box if you want to send error reports to
Microsoft. Otherwise, just choose Next.
h. Wait for the installation process to finish, and then exit the wizard and the SQL Server
Installation Center.
Office Telemetry Processor

Office Telemetry Processor runs on one or more computers and collects inventory, usage, and
health data from the shared folder and imports the data to the database. The processor is
installed as a Windows service named "Office Telemetry Processor" and the processor supports
Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2.
） Important
If the computers that run the processor and the shared folder pair, and the SQL database
aren't joined to a domain, you must install these components by using the script that is
described in Quickly set up Office Telemetry Dashboard on a workgroup or domain-
joined computer.
The processor generates error logs in a file that is named dperrorlog.txt. It is located in a
hidden folder at %systemroot%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Temp.
Each computer on which you install the processors and database must also run the latest
version of the Universal C Runtime (CRT) for the version of Windows running on the computer.
For information, see Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows .
We recommend the following operating systems for computers that run the processor:
For production environments: For best performance, we recommend you use a supported
version of Windows Server, such as Windows Server 2019.
For test or small production environments: You can use computers that run Windows 10 or
Windows 11 in test environments and in small production environments. There is a limit of 20
concurrent connections for client operating systems, but in small environments, the agent
randomization setting should minimize any chance of more than 20 agents connecting at one
time.
Ensure that you have the following available before you run the wizard to set up the
processor.
SQL Server instance name. The example used earlier is "teledash."
SQL database. A new database will be created if you don't specify an existing database.
Permissions to create a shared folder, or the UNC path of an existing shared folder. The
wizard that sets up the processor can create a shared folder if it has permissions to do
so. If you specify an existing shared folder, any existing NTFS and shared folder
permissions are overwritten with permissions set by the wizard.
Permissions to create a database (sysadmin role in SQL Server). To create and configure
a new database, the account that runs the wizard to set up the processor must be a
domain account that is a member of the sysadmin server-level role on the SQL Server.
For ongoing use of Office Telemetry Dashboard, membership in the sysadmin role isn't
required and can be removed after the database is created. You can also use an existing
database.
At least 11 GB of hard disk space. This disk space is needed to temporarily store data
that is collected from users.
To install the Office Telemetry Processor

1. On the computer where you want to install the processor, install the latest version of the
CRT. For more information, see Update for Universal C Runtime in Windows .
2. In Office Telemetry Dashboard, on the Getting started worksheet, choose the installation
link under 2. Install Telemetry Processor. Select the x86 or x64 version that's the same as
the Windows operating system architecture where the processor will run.
3. Optionally, you can use the links in Office Telemetry Dashboard to save the .msi file to
another computer and run the Setup program there. This step is required if you are
installing processors on separate computers.
4. Choose Next and then choose Yes to accept the User Account Control prompt to install
the processor. Choose Finish, which starts the Office Telemetry Processor settings
wizard.
5. Choose Yes to accept the prompt, and then choose Next.
6. Type the name of the SQL Server instance, and then choose Connect.
7. Type the name of a new database, choose Create, and then choose Next.
8. Choose Yes to create database permissions and the database role.
9. Do one of the following on the Shared Folder page:
Specify the UNC path of an existing shared folder, and then choose Next. Choose
Yes to allow the wizard to set the appropriate permissions.
To create a new shared folder on the local computer, choose Browse. Navigate to
the location where you want to create the shared folder. Open the shortcut menu
for the parent folder (right-click it), point to New, and then choose Folder. Type the
name of the new folder, ensure that you choose the folder again to select it, and
then choose Select Folder. Choose Next, and then choose Yes to allow the wizard
to share the folder and set the appropriate permissions.
10. Accept the default option to sign up for the Customer Experience Improvement Program,
or choose the option not to sign up for the program at this point, and then choose Next.
11. Choose Finish to exit the wizard.
Database used by Office Telemetry Dashboard

The database, which was created by the Office Telemetry Processor settings wizard, is ready
to be configured and connected to Office Telemetry Dashboard.
To connect to the database

1. In Office Telemetry Dashboard, on the Getting started worksheet, under 5. Connect to
the database to view telemetry data, choose Connect to Database.
2. Specify the name of the SQL Server and SQL database that you specified during the
installation of the processor.
When the connection is established, many new worksheets are added to the workbook. They
won't contain data until you deploy and enable the agents.
To grant other administrators permission to access the

database
You can use the Telemetry Dashboard Administration Tool (Tdadm) on the computer
that is running SQL Server to allow other administrators to view data in Office Telemetry
Dashboard. You don't have to run this for your own account if you created a database
when you installed the processor. Update the values for dbserver, dbname, and
domain\user as needed.
Console
tdadm.exe -o permission -databaseserver dbserver -databasename dbname -add

domain\user
For more information about Tdadm, see the Tdadm wiki .

For more information about how to configure the reporting threshold in the database to help
protect user privacy, see Manage the privacy of data monitored by Office Telemetry
Dashboard. If you have problems connecting to the database, see Troubleshooting Office
Telemetry Dashboard deployments.
If your data (for example, file names, solution names, user names, computer names, or tag
values) includes supplementary characters (surrogate pairs), use the following SC collations
that are available in SQL Server to support better handling of the characters.
Version 90 Windows collations, such as Chinese_PRC_Stroke_90
Version 100 Windows collations, such as Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_SC
For more details about collation settings, see the documentation for the version of SQL Server
that you are using.
Office Telemetry Agent

The following information and instructions will help you learn more about how to deploy and
enable the Office Telemetry Agent.
Deploying the agent

The agent is built into Office 2019, Office 2016, and Office 2013 and doesn't have to be
deployed separately. If your organization has any of the following versions of Office, you must
deploy the Office 2019 or Office 2016 agent to these clients.
Office 2003
Office 2007
Office 2010
７ Note
Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, and Office 2013 are no longer supported.
For computers that are running Office 2013 and you have the Office 2013 agent installed on
the computer, there are several additional considerations:
You can monitor computers running Office 2013 from the Office 2019 or Office 2016
Office Telemetry Dashboard. In order for this to work, the computer must also be running
the Office 2013 agent. The agent must be configured to point to the Office 2019 or
Office 2016 Office Telemetry Dashboard.
You cannot use an Office 2019 or Office 2016 agent with Office 2013. The Office 2019 or
Office 2016 agent will not be able to read events from an Office 2013 installation.
Once you have upgraded a computer to Office 2019 or Office 2016, you can continue to
run the old Office 2013 agent. The agent will continue to report data to the Office 2013
Office Telemetry Dashboard. At the same time, the new Office 2019 or Office 2016 agent
that was installed when you upgraded to Office 2019 or Office 2016 will provide the
same data to the Office 2019 or Office 2016 Office Telemetry Dashboard. This may use
up valuable computer and network bandwidth resources. We recommend you disable
the Office 2013 agent once you are ready to move to Office 2019 or Office 2016 Office
When you install the Office 2019 or Office 2016 agent, it does not overwrite the Office
2013 agent. Instead, you need to disable the Office 2013 agent. You disable the agent by
using Group Policy. For more information on the Group Policy settings you use to disable
the agent, see Enabling and configuring the agent.
We recommend that you do not deploy the Office 2019 or Office 2016 agent on
computers that are only running Office 2013.
In order to run the agent, client computers must run one of the following versions of Windows
(either 32-bit or 64-bit):
Window 10
Windows 8.1
Windows 7 with Service Pack 1
Windows Server 2016
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows Server 2012
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2008
The agent might not work correctly on Windows service packs that are no longer supported
by Microsoft. We recommend that you verify that your service pack is supported on Search
Product and Services Lifecycle Information before you install the agent.
７ Note
Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 R2, and
Windows Server 2008 are no longer supported.
The computer running the agent must also run the latest version of the Universal C Runtime
(CRT) for the version of Windows. For information, see Update for Universal C Runtime in
Windows .
To deploy the Office 2019 or Office 2016 agent to Office 2010,

Office 2007, and Office 2003 clients
1. In Office Telemetry Dashboard, on the Getting started worksheet, under 3. Deploy
Telemetry Agent, choose the appropriate link (x86 or x64) to save the agent .msi file to a
specified location.
2. Using your preferred method, deploy the .msi file to client computers that you want to
monitor. Be sure to match the x86 or x64 version of the agent to the architecture of the
Windows operating system that is running on the client, not the Office client
architecture.
For client local installations, you must run the .msi file as an administrator. You can
deploy the MSI package silently by using the /quiet parameter with the MSI. Refer to the
MSI help for the full set of available parameters.
For large-scale deployments, you can deploy Telemetry Agent by using Microsoft
Configuration Manager.
Enabling and configuring the agent

To enable and configure the agent, you can edit the registry on each monitored client
computer in small or test environments. For production environments that contain hundreds
or thousands of client computers, you can use Group Policy administrative templates. Two
settings, AgentInitWait and AgentRandomDelay, are configurable only in the registry.
Use the registry to enable and configure the agent
Use Group Policy to enable and configure the agent
Use the registry to enable and configure the agent

The easiest way to update the registry on a single client is to run a .reg file that sets the
registry values that enable the agent to collect and upload data. You can create this .reg file by
copying one of the following examples to a text file, updating the required fields, saving the
file as agent.reg and then running it from an elevated command prompt. In the .reg file,
ensure that you specify the UNC path of the shared folder to which the agent uploads the
data. Optionally, you can update the <TAG> fields so you can easily identify the collected data
in your organization, such as by department, location, or deployment group.
The following example sets the default settings that are needed to enable the agent.
AgentInitWait and AgentRandomDelay are set to their default values, which are appropriate
for production deployments.
Console
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\osm]
"CommonFileShare"="\\\\<SERVERNAME>\\<SHARENAME>"
"Tag1"="<TAG1>"
"Tag2"="<TAG2>"
"Tag3"="<TAG3>"
"Tag4"="<TAG4>"
"AgentInitWait"=dword:00000258
"Enablelogging"=dword:00000001
"EnableUpload"=dword:00000001
"EnableFileObfuscation"=dword:00000000
"AgentRandomDelay"=dword:000000F0
The code in the following example enables Office Telemetry Dashboard to begin uploading
data immediately by setting AgentInitWait and AgentRandomDelay to their smallest values.
Use this example only in test deployments.
Console

"CommonFileShare"="\\\\<SERVERNAME>\\<SHARENAME>"
"Tag1"="<TAG1>"
"Tag2"="<TAG2>"
"Tag3"="<TAG3>"
"Tag4"="<TAG4>"
"AgentInitWait"=dword:00000001
"AgentRandomDelay"=dword:00000000
You can distribute registry updates to multiple client computers by putting a .reg file in a
shared folder and instructing users to run the file, or you can add a command to the users'
logon script to automatically import the .reg file when users log on. Use the syntax in the
following example to start the .reg file from a logon script:
Console
%windir%\regedit.exe /s <PATH>\<NAME>.reg
For more information about how to use .reg files, see How to add, modify, or delete registry
subkeys and values by using a registration entries (.reg) file .
The following tables describe each registry value.
７ Note
If you're not an administrator, you'll have to edit the registry under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OSM. These changes can be
overwritten by policy settings that are located in
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OSM.
Agent registry settings under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OSM
Value name Type Value description and data Required

or
optional
enablelogging REG_DWORD Enables runtime logging and static scanning. This Required
allows the agent to collect data.
Value:
1 = Enable logging and agent

0 = Disable logging and agent
Default = 0 (Disable logging & agent)
enableupload REG_DWORD Turns on the data uploading feature in the agent so Required
that the agent can periodically upload data to the
shared folder that is specified in CommonFileShare.
Value:
0 = Do not upload
1 = Upload
Default = 0 (Do not upload)
commonfileshare REG_SZ Specifies the UNC path of the shared folder for Required
storing data.
Value:
\\server\share
or
optional
tag1 REG_SZ Adds custom tags to the data that is sent by the Optional
tag2 agent. If you enable this policy setting, the specified
tag3 custom tags are shown in Office Telemetry
tag4 Dashboard, where you can filter the collected data
by the tag name. You can replace tag1, tag2, tag3,
and tag4 with custom strings to categorize and filter
the collected data (for example, replace tag1 with a
department name, replace tag2 with the location of
the users, and so on).
Value:
tag1
tag2
tag3
tag4
enablefileobfuscation REG_DWORD Configures the agent to disguise, or obfuscate, Optional

certain file properties that are reported in data. If
you enable this policy setting, the agent obfuscates
the file name, file path, and title of Office documents
before uploading data to the shared folder. You can
learn more about file obfuscation and other privacy
settings for Office Telemetry Dashboard in Manage
the privacy of data monitored by Office Telemetry
Dashboard.
Value:
0 = Do not obfuscate
1 = Obfuscate
Default = 0 (No obfuscation)
or
optional
AgentInitWait REG_DWORD IMPORTANT: To avoid affecting network or client Optional

performance, decrease this value in test
environments only.
Adjusts the time that the agent waits before it scans

a client and uploads data to the shared folder. If this
value doesn't exist, the default wait time is 10
minutes (600 seconds). In test environments, you can
specify 1 second to remove the delay for testing
Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 and earlier clients. We
recommend that you set this to at least 60 seconds
for computers that run Windows "8."
Value:
x = Wait time in seconds
AgentRandomDelay REG_DWORD IMPORTANT: To avoid affecting network or client Optional

performance, decrease this value in test
environments only.
Adjusts the maximum random delay, in minutes. The

agent randomly waits between 0 and
AgentRandomDelay minutes, in addition to the
AgentInitWait value, before it starts to scan or
upload data. If this value doesn't exist, the agent
waits between 0 minutes to 240 minutes. In test
environments, you can specify 0 to remove the
random delay for testing.
Value:
x = Random delay in minutes

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OSM\preventedapplications
Value name Value type Value description and data Required

or
optional
or
optional
accesssolution REG_DWORD Prevents data for specific Office applications from being Optional
olksolution reported to Office Telemetry Dashboard. You can learn
onenotesolution more about this registry setting in Manage the privacy of
pptsolution data monitored by Office Telemetry Dashboard.
projectsolution
publishersolution Value:
visiosolution
wdsolution 1 = Prevent reporting
xlsolution 0 = Allow reporting
Default = 0 (Allow reporting)

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OSM\preventedsolutiontype
s

or
optional
agave REG_DWORD Prevents data for specific solutions from being reported to Optional
appaddins Office Telemetry Dashboard. However, the solution type is
comaddins still reported. You can learn more about this registry setting
documentfiles in Manage the privacy of data monitored by Office
templatefiles Telemetry Dashboard.
Value:
1 = Prevent reporting
0 = Allow reporting
Use Group Policy to enable and configure the agent

You can also use Group Policy to enable and configure agents. Download the Administrative
Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Office from the Microsoft Download Center . The policy
settings that are listed in the following table are available in the path User
Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office 2016\Telemetry
Dashboard.
Agent policy settings
Setting name Description Required

or
optional
Setting name Description Required
or
optional
Turn on Turns on the data collection features in Office that are used by Office Required
telemetry Telemetry Dashboard and Office Telemetry Log. By default, data collection is
data disabled in Office.
collection
Turn on data Turns on the data uploading feature in the agent so that the agent can Required
uploading for periodically upload data to a shared folder. By default, data uploading is
Office disabled.
Telemetry
Agent
Specify the Specifies the Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) path of a shared folder to Required
UNC path to which the agent sends data.
store Office
telemetry
data
Specify Adds custom tags to the data that is sent by the agent. If you enable this Optional
custom tags policy setting, the specified custom tags are shown in Office Telemetry
for Office Dashboard, where you can filter the collected data by the tag name. You can
telemetry specify any string that you want to categorize and filter the collected data
data (for example, department name, title of user, and so on).
Turn on Configures the agent to disguise, or obfuscate, certain file properties that Optional
privacy are reported in data. If you enable this policy setting, the agent obfuscates
settings in the file name, file path, and title of Office documents before uploading data
Office to the shared folder.
Telemetry
Agent You can learn more about file obfuscation and other privacy settings for
Office Telemetry Dashboard in Manage the privacy of data monitored by
Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Office Prevents data for specific Office applications from being reported to Office Optional
applications Telemetry Dashboard.
to exclude
from Office
Telemetry
Agent
reporting
Office Prevents data for specific Office solutions from being reported to Office Optional
solutions to Telemetry Dashboard.
exclude from
Office
Telemetry
Agent
reporting
Triggering data collection manually
When a user logs in to an Office client, the agent waits 10 minutes to allow other logon
processes to be completed, and then waits a randomized number of minutes up to 4 hours (or
the max delay that is set for the AgentRandomDelay registry value) to avoid client computers
sending data to network at the same time. After this initial scan, the agent scans and collects
data every 8 hours.
If you want to trigger the data collection manually and see data uploaded immediately to
Office Telemetry Dashboard, set the following registry values as described in the earlier table:
For computers that run Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 and earlier
AgentInitWait: 1
AgentRandomRelay: 0
For computers that run Windows 8.1 and later
Because user logon is faster in Windows 8.1 and later versions of Microsoft Windows, we
recommend setting AgentInitWait to at least 60 seconds to ensure that the network
connection is ready after the user logs on.
AgentInitWait: 60
AgentRandomRelay: 0
To trigger a scan manually, use one of the following procedures.
To trigger scanning and data collection on Windows clients

1. Ensure that the computer is connected to an AC power supply.
2. In Task Scheduler on the client computer, expand Task Scheduler Library, expand
Microsoft, and then choose Office.
3. Right-click OfficeTelemetryAgentLogOn, and then choose Run.
Frequently asked questions about Office Telemetry

Dashboard
Q: What happens if a client computer is disconnected for some time?
A: If a monitored client is disconnected, or if the shared folder is temporarily unavailable, data

is still collected locally on the client. When the connection is restored, the backlog of
information is delivered to the shared folder.
Q: How much data is transferred during each transfer?
A: The amount varies according to the number of files that are used and solutions installed.
Here are estimates for how much data the agent sends for different versions of Office:
Earlier versions of Office send approximately 50 KB for every upload.
Office 2013 and later send approximately 64 KB of data for every upload.
The amount transferred can be larger when the interval is set to longer than the default or
when the data sits idle on the local computer for long periods of time. Note that actual file
content isn't transferred; only metadata about the files is transferred.
Q: What is the performance impact of installing and running the agent?
A: The agent is transparent to the user and performs low-impact tasks, such as inspecting
content from MRU and specific local registry settings. The agent doesn't actively scan files. The
agent does account for monitor power state and network status to avoid affecting client
performance.
Q: How can I re-initialize an agent?
A: The agent is stored locally on the client computer at

%localappdata%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Telemetry. You can delete the contents of this folder to
reinitialize the computer and start a fresh discovery. Note that this is a per-user data location.
Q: How frequently is data sent to the shared folder?
A: Data is transferred from the client to the shared folder when users log on and every 8 hours
while the user is logged in. You can adjust this interval in Task Scheduler.
Q: What is the format of the collected data?
A: Collected data is stored and transferred in binary format to optimize the storage and data
transfer requirements.
Q: If I change the custom labels after I deploy the agents, when will the new labels be updated
in the database?
A: Only files that are in the Most Recently Used list will have their labels updated in the
database. This will occur the next time the agent sends usage data. For files that are not in the
Most Recently Used list, they will continue to show the old labels in the database until the user
opens the file and the agent uploads usage data.
Troubleshooting Office Telemetry Dashboard

deployments
The following table describes some symptoms that you might encounter after you deploy
Office Telemetry Dashboard and its components.
Troubleshooting Office Telemetry Dashboard deployments
Issue Description Resolution
Office The wizard The computers that run the processor, shared folder, and SQL database must be
Telemetry fails with the joined to a domain so that the appropriate security settings can be configured.
Processor message "The Ensure the computer or computers are in trusted domains.
settings Telemetry
wizard Processor You can install these components on a single workgroup computer or domain-
fails settings joined computer by using the script that is described in the blog post Quickly set
wizard can up Office Telemetry Dashboard on a workgroup or domain-joined computer.
only run on
computers
that are
joined to a
domain. Join
the computer
to a domain
and run the
wizard again."
Office The processor If there are two or more instances of SQL Server, ensure that you point to the
Telemetry is using the correct SQL Server instance by using the format Servername\SQLServerinstance
Processor wrong SQL during the processor setup.
settings Server
wizard instance.
fails
Office The agent Check the registry path and value for the CommonFileShare, EnableLogging, and
Telemetry isn't EnableUpload registry values. These are described in Enabling and configuring the
Dashboard uploading agent, earlier in this article.
shows no data and the
data Msoia.exe
process isn't
running in
Task Manager.
Office The agent By default, the agent has an initial wait timer and randomization feature to avoid
Telemetry isn't scanning uploading large amounts of data at the same time as other agents and affecting
Dashboard or uploading network bandwidth. Update the AgentInitWait and AgentRandomDelay registry
shows no data. The values to remove this delay in test environments. Otherwise the upload process
data Msoia.exe can be delayed for up to 4 hours and 10 minutes. These registry values are
process runs described in Enabling and configuring the agent, earlier in this article. You can
in Task learn how to trigger scanning and uploading in Triggering data collection
Manager for a manually.
long time.
Office The agent Verify the network connection between the agent and the shared folder.
Telemetry doesn't
Dashboard upload data. Verify that the computer is joined to a domain. The shared folder is configured to
shows no The Msoia.exe allow access only to users who are authenticated within the domain.
data process runs
in Task The agent continues to try to upload data after the upload has failed. When using
Manager for a the default registry values, the agent continues to run as a process in Task
long time. Manager for up to 4 hours and 10 minutes (max). To adjust registry values, see
Enabling and configuring the agent, earlier in this article. You can learn how to
trigger scanning and uploading in Triggering data collection manually.
Office The agent Check the information in the Last Run Result column in Task Scheduler. If the
Telemetry task doesn't operation succeeds, it shows return code 0. If the agent cannot upload data to the
Dashboard seem to be shared folder, the message "The network name cannot be found" appears in the
shows no working. Last Run Result column. This is the only error that the agent logs in the Last Run
data Result column. If other errors are listed, they were caused by other reasons or the
scheduled task didn't run.
Office The processor Verify the network connection between the processor and the shared folder. Was
Telemetry isn't working. the processor configured by the Office Telemetry Processor settings wizard? The
Dashboard There are permissions on the shared folder can vary, depending on the processor location
shows no many folders and the database. Run the Office Telemetry Processor settings wizard again from
data and files in the shortcut on the desktop.
the shared
folder.
Office The processor The processor processes the files in the shared folder to the database one time
Telemetry is working but per minute. If the processor fails to process the files three times, it will move the
Dashboard there are failed files to the Failed folder. See the processor log
shows no many folders (%windows%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Temp\dperrorlog.txt)
data and files for more information.
under in the
Failed folder
under the
shared folder.
Office The processor Check the authentication type for SQL Server. Office Telemetry Dashboard doesn't
Telemetry isn't working support SQL authentication. You must use Windows authentication.
Dashboard because of
shows no SQL Server
data authentication
settings.
Office The processor If there is a firewall between Office Telemetry Dashboard and the database, check
Telemetry isn't working whether the SQL port is enabled in the firewall configuration. The default port for
Dashboard because of SQL Server is 1433. See Configure a Windows Firewall for Database Engine Access
shows no firewall issues for more information.
data between the
processor and
the database.
Office The processor If there is a firewall between Office Telemetry Dashboard and the database, check
Telemetry isn't working whether the SQL port is enabled in the firewall configuration. The default port for
Dashboard because of SQL Express isn't a fixed value. Check the port number in the SQL Configuration
shows no firewall issues Manager and add the port to the firewall configuration. See Configure a Windows
data between the Firewall for Database Engine Access for more information.
processor, the
database, and
SQL Express.
Office The processor See the processor log

Telemetry isn't working. (%windows%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Temp\dperrorlog.txt)
Dashboard for more information.
shows no
data
Office Office Check the permission role for Office Telemetry Dashboard. Add the user to the
Telemetry Telemetry td_readonly role by using OSQL, SQLCMD, Enterprise Manager, or the Telemetry
Dashboard Dashboard Dashboard Administration Tool (Tdadm). See Database used by Office Telemetry
can't shows an Dashboard earlier in this article for more information.
connect to error message
the that states it
database can't connect
to the
database
because of
SQL Server
permissions.
Office Office If there are two or more instances of SQL Server, ensure that the Data connection
Telemetry Telemetry settings dialog box in Office Telemetry Dashboard uses the correct SQL Server
Dashboard Dashboard instance in the format Servername\SQLServerinstance.
can't shows an
the that states it
to the
database.
Office Office If the SQL Server is SQL Express, ensure that the SQL Server instance name is
Telemetry Telemetry correct. The default instance name for SQL Express differs from SQL Server, for
Dashboard Dashboard example: Servername\SQLExpress.
can't shows an
the that states it
to the
database.
Office Office If the SQL Server default collation is case-sensitive (for example, the Japanese
Telemetry Telemetry version of SQL Server is case-sensitive by default), ensure that you entered a case-
Dashboard Dashboard sensitive database name in the Data connection settings dialog box in Office
can't shows an Telemetry Dashboard.
the that states it
to the
database.
Related topics
Plan a deployment of Office Telemetry Dashboard
Monitor Office compatibility and deployments by using Office Telemetry Dashboard
Removal of Office Telemetry Dashboard
from Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise
Article • 12/14/2023
） Important

enterprise (as of Version 2208).
Office Telemetry Dashboard is being removed from Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise.
For more information about what happens to the Office Telemetry Dashboard
components, see What happens when Office Telemetry Dashboard is removed?
When will Office Telemetry Dashboard be

removed?
The date when Office Telemetry Dashboard is removed from Microsoft 365 Apps for
enterprise depends on which update channel you're using.
ﾉ Expand table
Update channel Version Release date
Current Channel Version 2301 January 26, 2023
Monthly Enterprise Channel Version 2301 March 14, 2023
Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel (Preview) Version 2302 March 14, 2023
Semi-Annual Enterprise Channel Version 2302 July 11, 2023
Which versions of Office are affected?

Office Telemetry Dashboard is being removed only from versions of Microsoft 365 Apps
for enterprise.
Office Telemetry Dashboard is not being removed from volume licensed versions of
Office, such as Office Professional Plus 2019. For those versions, Office Telemetry
Dashboard is supported as long as that version of Office is supported.
The following table lists the end of support dates for volume licensed versions of Office
that include Office Telemetry Dashboard.
ﾉ Expand table
Office version End of support date
Office Standard 2013 April 11, 2023

Office Professional Plus 2013
Office Standard 2016 October 14, 2025

Office Professional Plus 2016
Office Professional Plus 2019 October 14, 2025
７ Note
Office Telemetry Dashboard isn't available in Microsoft 365 Apps for business or in
Office LTSC 2021.
What happens when Office Telemetry

Dashboard is removed?
When you update to the version of Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise where Office
Telemetry dashboard is removed, some Office Telemetry Dashboard components are
uninstalled automatically. Other components need to be removed manually. All
components become unsupported.
Office Telemetry Agent

The Office Telemetry Agent is uninstalled automatically from devices.
Telemetry Dashboard for Office

The Telemetry Dashboard for Office (the Excel workbook) is uninstalled automatically.
Office Telemetry Processor
The Office Telemetry Processor is no longer needed. You need to remove it manually
from devices on which it's installed.
Shared folder
The shared folder, which is used by the Office Telemetry Agent and the Office Telemetry
Processor, is no longer needed. You need to remove it manually.
Database
The SQL Server database, which stores the information used by Office Telemetry
Dashboard, is no longer needed. You need to remove it manually.
Office Telemetry Log
Office Telemetry Log isn't being removed and is still available on client devices running
Windows.
What is the replacement for Office Telemetry

Dashboard?
As an alternative to Office Telemetry Dashboard, we recommend using the following
tools, depending on the information you need:
Inventory feature in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center

Apps health feature in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center
Microsoft 365 Apps readiness features in Microsoft Configuration Manager
(current branch)
For more information about these tools, see the following articles:
Overview of application compatibility and readiness assessment tools for Microsoft

365 Apps
Overview of inventory in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center
Overview of Apps health in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center
Introduction to Apps health (video)
Microsoft 365 Apps readiness dashboard (in Configuration Manager)
Feedback

Monitor Office compatibility and
deployments by using Office Telemetry
Dashboard
Article • 05/21/2024
） Important

After you deploy the components of Office Telemetry Dashboard and the agents have
collected data, you can use Office Telemetry Dashboard to investigate stability issues for
Office documents and Office solutions. You can also use Office Telemetry Dashboard to
see the status of Office deployments. This article guides you through navigating the
worksheets in Office Telemetry Dashboard. It explains how to use filters to adjust data
display, and covers troubleshooting common error messages in Office Telemetry
Dashboard.
） Important

Apps.
Open Office Telemetry Dashboard and connect

to the database
After the Office Telemetry Dashboard components are deployed, you're ready to start
Office Telemetry Dashboard and connect to the database.
To help you get started, view this short video called *Quick tips for Office Telemetry
Dashboard navigation.
Short video about Office Telemetry Dashboard navigation

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/e766090b-4229-45d5-a9cc-
dee992054990?autoplay=false&postJsllMsg=true
versions of Office.
The way you start Office Telemetry Dashboard depends on the operating system you're
using. The following table lists and describes the procedures for each supported
operating system:
To start Office Telemetry Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Operating system How to start Office Telemetry Dashboard
Windows 10, Windows 7, From the Start menu, choose All Programs, then Microsoft Office
or Windows Server 2008 2016 Tools, then Telemetry Dashboard for Office 2016.
R2
Windows 8.1 On the Start screen, right-click the background or swipe in from the
top or bottom to display the app bar, select All apps, and then select
Telemetry Dashboard for Office 2016.
Windows Server 2012 or Swipe in from the right edge to show the charms and then select
Windows Server 2012 R2 Search to see all the apps that are installed on the computer. Next,
choose Telemetry Dashboard for Office 2016.
７ Note
Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 ended on January 14,
2020.
To connect to the database

1. On the Getting started worksheet, choose Connect to Database.
2. In the Data connection settings dialog box, enter the name of the SQL Server
server and database where data is stored, and then choose OK.
After you connect Office Telemetry Dashboard to the database, new worksheets are
added to display information about Office documents, solutions, and other information.
If you haven't yet deployed Office Telemetry Dashboard components, or if data isn't
populating the dashboard as expected, see Deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Navigating in Office Telemetry Dashboard

After deploying all components and connecting Office Telemetry Dashboard to the
database, new worksheets display information about documents, solutions, and other
data. The navigation pane on the left side of the Office Telemetry Dashboard window is
the primary way to navigate through the worksheets in the dashboard. You can also use
the navigation pane to change the data range and label filters.
To learn more about the worksheets in Office Telemetry Dashboard, visit these
resources:
This article includes a brief overview of the worksheets and how to use them in
Learn about the Office Telemetry Dashboard worksheets. The rest of this article
tells you how to adjust filters, how to determine overall Office stability, and how to
investigate unstable documents and solutions.
You can dig deeper by reading Office Telemetry Dashboard worksheets that
describes every worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard in detail. This is helpful if
you want more information about the columns and data shown in a worksheet.
Custom reporting and database schema reference for Office Telemetry Dashboard
helps you create custom reports in Office Telemetry Dashboard using a PivotTable
report. Custom reports can help you customize how data is displayed for different
business purposes. For example, you can view all Warning errors for Excel in a
certain business group, create a list of all solutions that use unregistered ActiveX
controls, and more.
Learn about the Office Telemetry Dashboard

worksheets
The following table briefly describes the primary worksheets in Office Telemetry
Dashboard. For more detailed information about the worksheets, see Office Telemetry
Dashboard worksheets.
Overview of Office Telemetry Dashboard worksheets
ﾉ Expand table
Worksheet Purpose
name
Overview Provides a quick view of the health of Office documents and solutions and a
view of deployment trends. The links on this worksheet help you investigate
Office compatibility and stability issues in your organization.
Documents Helps you investigate which Office documents are the most heavily used and
identify documents that are experiencing issues.
This worksheet displays Office documents detected in the Most Recently Used
(MRU) files in the local registry of monitored clients running Office and earlier
supported versions.
The list also contains load events for monitored clients that run Office. Select
any of the value links to open a worksheet that provides more detail. For
example, in the Total Users column, you can select any number to view the
users who have that file in their MRU list.
Solutions Shows details about solutions, such as COM add-ins, that were detected on
monitored computers. This worksheet also shows data about load events on
monitored client computers that run Office.
Check the Critical column for a count of the number of unique users who have
hit critical errors that the solutions are causing on Office clients. By reviewing
critical errors and the number of users affected, you can decide whether to
forcibly block add-ins that are crashing for many users. To do so, choose the
Add-in management mode link at the top of the worksheet.
Worksheet Purpose
name
You can also investigate performance issues that might be causing a solution
to take a longer time to load than expected on some computers. The load
time values that are displayed in this worksheet are statistical averages. Select
on of the value links to see individual user load times for a particular
document.
Telemetry Lists the servers that run a processor, the number of users and computers that
Processor are monitored, and the date and time of the last update.
Deployments Lists the versions of Office that are detected and other details, such as
architecture type and number of unique instances of each version.
Custom report Helps you to create a PivotTable report so that you can customize how you
view the data in Office Telemetry Dashboard. Create a custom report if the
Documents and Solutions worksheets don't display data in the way that you
want to view it. To learn more, see Custom reporting and database schema
reference for Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Getting started Provides step-by-step guidance to deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard

components.
Office Telemetry Provides a brief tutorial on Office Telemetry Dashboard concepts.

Dashboard
guide
Use filters to adjust what's shown in an Office

Telemetry Dashboard worksheet
In the navigation pane on the left side of the dashboard, there are filters called Label1,
Label2, Label3, Label4, Date range, and View. You can use these filters to change the
scope of the data that is shown in a worksheet. Any time that you change a filter, you
must select the Refresh button to refresh the data in the content pane. The
Refresh button is located in the upper-right corner of most worksheets. When you
refresh the data, the sorting order is automatically reset. You can verify when the
content pane was last updated by referring to the time stamp that is located below the
Refresh button on the navigation pane.
Label filters
Use the Label filters to filter data by department, location, or deployment group.
These filters are available for most worksheets.
The Label filters are populated by data that is specified in the <TAG> fields when
you deploy the agent on client computers. For more information on how to set
these fields, see Office Telemetry Agent.
Date range filter
Use the Date range filter to choose the date range for the data that you want to
view. This helps you watch trends over longer periods of time, or drill down and
find more recent data for analysis.
The graphs on the Overview worksheet, such as Documents and Solutions
stability and Office deployment trend, show data that extends back to four times
the selected date range in the navigation pane. This provides better context when
you graphically display the data and trends for analysis. For longer date ranges,
there might be a small delay before the results are displayed in the content pane.
The Overview worksheet supports changing the date range to Last 7 days, Last 1
month, or Last 3 months. A snapshot of the database is taken every evening at
midnight (local server time). It's used to compose the graphs and data that are
shown on the Overview worksheet. Therefore, the Overview worksheet isn't real-
time, but is, instead, based on nightly snapshots.
View filter
The View filter on the Documents and Solutions worksheets allows you to select
prescoped views that help you analyze data. Here are the options that you can
choose from:
Frequently used displays all documents or solutions that were used within the
selected date range, sorted by total number of users.
Frequently used by Office 2016 and later displays all documents or solutions
that were used by Office within the selected range, sorted by total number of
users of Office.
Attention items displays all documents or solutions that have critical issues that
were found within the selected date range.
Stability - Top 400/100 displays the documents (up to 400) or solutions (up to
100) that have success rates that are less than the target threshold (95% for
documents, 99.9% for solutions).
Determine the overall stability of Office

documents and solutions throughout your
organization
The Overview worksheet allows you to quickly understand how your critical documents
and solutions (add-ins) are behaving on users' computers. Instead of browsing the
Documents and Solutions worksheets, which show you item-by-item status, you can
open and refresh the Overview worksheet to see a high-level view of document and
solution stability.
The following screenshot shows the Overview worksheet.
The Overview worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
The four numbers that are highlighted at the top of the content pane show the number
of stable and unstable documents and solutions. If you see a high unstable count, you
should investigate to find out what is occurring.
The metrics for stable versus unstable are calculated by determining whether the
documents or solutions have success rates that meet the following thresholds:
95% for documents
99.9% for solutions
If a document or solution meets these thresholds, they're considered stable. If they don't
meet these thresholds, they're considered unstable. The success rate is determined by
the percentage of sessions where the document or solution operated without
encountering a critical issue. The critical issues that are tracked by Office Telemetry
include application crashes, Office object model calls that would definitively fail for
compatibility reasons, and more. A session is defined by the opening of a document or
solution or an elapsed 24-hour period where the document is open.
You can use the filters in the navigation pane to focus on specific business groups in
your organization or customized date ranges. For example, you might want to know
how well the new Sales reporting solutions for Office are performing since their
deployment last month. You can select the Last 1 month date range, and the
appropriate Label for the Sales team's computers. After you select Refresh, the
Overview worksheet view shows you a high-level view of document and solution
stability for the Sales team's Office deployments. From there, you can decide your next
steps.
In addition, the Overview worksheet view provides a summary of the top 400 frequently
used documents and the top 100 frequently used solutions. Research indicates that
these numbers represent the average number of documents and solutions in any given
enterprise department that are frequently used.
７ Note
Built-in documents and solutions that are provided by Microsoft aren't included in
the top documents and solutions counts that are displayed on the Overview
worksheet.
Drill down to investigate unstable documents

or solutions that require your attention
After you know the number of unstable documents and solutions, you can drill into the
details. On the Overview worksheet, select a value to see a detailed list of stable or
unstable documents or solutions. The following graphic shows how to view the unstable
documents by selecting the corresponding value ( 23) on the Overview worksheet.
How to choose a value on the Overview worksheet to see unstable documents

After you select the link for unstable documents, the Documents worksheet appears.
The worksheet is filtered to show the 23 unstable documents. The following screenshot
shows an example of this filtered view. Although it isn't obvious in the screenshot, only
23 documents are listed, sorted by most unstable.
Unstable documents that are shown in the Documents worksheet
） Important
Remember that when you select a link on the Overview worksheet to see details
about documents or solutions, the contents pane displays a filtered view. Select the
message bar at the top of the header pane to see the full list of all items for that
worksheet.
Back on the Overview worksheet, under the stable and unstable counts, you can see the
trend charts that show how these counts increased or decreased over past periods. If
you see the trend line pointing down to indicate a decline in stability, this indicates that
recent changes are triggering issues for your documents and solutions. As shown in the
following screenshot, the date range that is displayed in the trend chart shows an
expanded range that is four times longer than the selected date range. This provides
better context to view the overall trend data.
How trend data is illustrated on the Overview worksheet
View the progress of Office deployments in

your organization
You can track your overall Office deployment progress by looking at the chart at the
lower part of the Overview worksheet. This shows the number of users who are running
each Office version and how the Office deployments have changed over time. By using
this chart, you can quickly check the deployment status and share progress with your
stakeholders.
７ Note
The date range that is displayed in the deployment trend chart shows an expanded
range that is four times longer than the selected date range. This provides better
context to view the overall trend data.
The following image shows an example of the Office deployment trend chart on the
Overview worksheet.
Office deployment trend chart on the Overview worksheet
Troubleshoot error messages that are shown in

As you use Office Telemetry Dashboard, you might notice error messages that are
shown in yellow banners at the top of the dashboard. The following sections describe
common error messages.
You see the error message "The Telemetry Dashboard

COM add-in isn't enabled or installed."
When you view a worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard, you might see the following
message:
COM add-in error message

To resolve this issue, enable the Office Telemetry Dashboard COM add-in that is
available in Office Professional Plus 2019, Office Professional Plus 2016, or Office
Standard 2016.
To enable the Office Telemetry Dashboard COM add-in

1. Start Office Telemetry Dashboard by choosing Telemetry Dashboard for Office
2016 in the All Apps page in Windows 8.1, or by choosing Telemetry Dashboard
for Office 2016 from the Start menu under Microsoft Office 2016 Tools in
Windows 10 or Windows 7. For Office 2019, look for Telemetry Dashboard for
Office under Microsoft Office Tools.
2. Select the Let's get started button.
3. In the Getting Started worksheet, select the Click here to use saved copies of
Telemetry Dashboard banner that is shown in the following screenshot.
Message that enables saved copies of Telemetry Dashboard
4. Reopen the Office Telemetry Dashboard Excel worksheet that had the error
message.
You see the error message "Telemetry Processor service(s)

have errors."
When you view a worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard, you might see the following
message:
Office Telemetry Processor error message
This error message is displayed when no agents have reported any data to the
dashboard, or if the processor hasn't inserted any data to the database for a day.
For more information, see the log file

(%windows%\ServiceProfiles\NetworkService\AppData\Local\Temp\dperrorlog.txt on
the computer where processor is running).
In addition, do the following:

Verify the network connection between the processor and the Office Telemetry
Dashboard is working as expected.
In Service in Control Panel, verify that the Office Telemetry Processor service is
running.
Verify that the SQL Server server is running correctly.
Verify that the data in the shared folder that was reported back from the agent was
processed correctly. If there are many folders and files in the shared folder that
weren't processed for more than 2 hours, the processor isn't working correctly.
For more information about how to troubleshoot the processor, see Troubleshooting
Office Telemetry Dashboard deployments.
Related articles
Office Telemetry Dashboard worksheets
Feedback

Manage add-ins by using Office
Telemetry Dashboard
Article • 05/21/2024
） Important

If you can prevent end users from running non-approved add-ins that might cause
issues or slow performance, then you can reduce your support costs. If an add-in is
crashing or takes a long time to load, you can disable the add-in for all Office client
computers at the same time. Using Office Telemetry Dashboard, you can monitor add-in
usage along with performance and other issues. With the collected data, you can decide
which add-ins should be managed. This article points to more information about how to
manage add-ins for Office by using Office Telemetry Dashboard.
About add-in management with Office

Telemetry Dashboard
Use the Add-in management worksheet to generate a Group Policy Object script that
sets the configuration state of add-ins that are used with Office. The following
screenshot displays the Add-in Management worksheet.
User interface for managing add-ins in Office Telemetry Dashboard

By using the Group Policy Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Office, you
can also create lists of managed add-ins and optionally block any add-in that isn't on
the list. Users can't override these settings unless you allow them to.
For more information about how to manage Office add-ins by using Office Telemetry
Dashboard, see Let's manage add-ins using Telemetry Dashboard.
Related topics
Feedback

Manage the privacy of data monitored by
Article • 05/23/2024
） Important
Office Telemetry Dashboard is no longer supported in Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise (as of
Version 2208), and is removed in Version 2301 (and later).
For more information, see Removal of Office Telemetry Dashboard from Microsoft 365 Apps for
enterprise.
Office Telemetry Dashboard is an Excel workbook that shows compatibility and inventory data for the Office
files, add-ins, and solutions used in an organization. Office Telemetry Dashboard displays the file names and
titles of documents in each user's Most Recently Used list, which might reveal personal or confidential
information about the user or organization. The names of add-ins and other solutions that are used by Office
are also displayed. This article explains how settings in Office Telemetry Dashboard and Office Telemetry Agent
protect user privacy. These settings disguise file names and titles or prevent data for selected applications and
solutions from being reported.
The agent collects inventory, usage, and health data, then uploads it to a shared folder. A service called Office
Telemetry Processor processes this data and inserts it into an SQL database. Office Telemetry Dashboard
connects to this database so that it can show the usage of Office files, add-ins, and solutions.
The agent is built into Office 2019 and Office 2016 and is installed separately on computers that run earlier
versions of Office. Whether the agent is built in or deployed separately, it doesn't generate or collect any data
until you enable logging. Use the registry or Group Policy Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for
Office as described in Deploy Office Telemetry Dashboard. After logging begins, data is stored on the local
computer under %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Telemetry and is uploaded periodically to a shared
folder.
） Important
Office Telemetry Dashboard is an on-premises tool that collects inventory, usage, and health data
about the Office documents and solutions, such as add-ins, used in your organization. The data is
primarily designed to help your organization with application compatibility testing.
Data collected for Office Telemetry Dashboard is stored in a SQL Server database controlled by your
organization and the data collected is not sent to Microsoft. For more information, see Data
collected by the agent for Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Data collected for Office Telemetry Dashboard is different than Office diagnostic data, which can be
sent to Microsoft. For more information about Office diagnostic data, see Overview of privacy
controls for Microsoft 365 Apps.
Settings used to manage Office Telemetry Dashboard have no impact on Office diagnostic data and
vice versa. For more information about managing Office diagnostic data, see Use policy settings to
manage privacy controls for Microsoft 365 Apps.
How to configure privacy and performance settings in

There are several ways that you can configure the level of detail that is displayed for Office files, add-ins, and
solutions in Office Telemetry Dashboard. Some methods, such as changing the reporting threshold, prevent
certain information from being shown in Office Telemetry Dashboard. Other methods prevent the agent from
uploading data so that it's never added to the database. Setting a threshold and preventing certain data from
uploading can also help improve the performance of the database and custom reports.
The following image provides a quick overview of the three methods that Office Telemetry Dashboard
provides to help you protect user privacy.
Three ways to configure privacy settings in Office Telemetry Dashboard
Adjust the reporting threshold in the database to show only files

that are used by multiple users
Office Telemetry Dashboard tracks the number of users who use an Office file that has the same name. These
files are usually shared and accessed by multiple users, and they often have more business value than files
used by a single user. As part of your compatibility planning, you can choose to ignore inventory and
compatibility events for files used by a single user and instead monitor files used across a department.
Configuring Office Telemetry Dashboard to report files that are used by, say, three or more users also helps
avoid displaying personal files, such as resumes. This setting reduces the data set returned in custom reports
in Office Telemetry Dashboard, helping you work around the 2-GB memory limitation in the 32-bit version
of Excel.
To prevent Office Telemetry Dashboard from displaying files that have a single author, you run a script that
adjusts the minimum reporting threshold in the database. Use the Telemetry Dashboard Administration Tool
(Tdadm) to filter out files that appear on two or fewer clients. Set the Threshold value to three, or to a larger
value if needed, as shown in the following example.
Console
tdadm.exe -o settings -databaseserver dbserver -databasename dbname -threshold 3
For more information about Tdadm, see the Tdadm wiki .
Disguise or obscure user and file data that is shown in Office

Telemetry Dashboard
It's common for users in an organization to save Office files by using file names that contain sensitive or
confidential information. These files might have high business value, justifying their monitoring for
compatibility issues. However, business groups like legal and human resources might object to monitoring
their computers to avoid revealing confidential file names to administrators using Office Telemetry Dashboard.
To allow yourself and other administrators to identify the owners of Office files that have compatibility issues
without revealing file names or specific locations, you can enable file obfuscation, which disguises Office file
names, titles, and file paths. This setting is configured on the agent, which performs the obfuscation task
before uploading data to the shared folder. The data that is stored on the local computer isn't obfuscated.
The following table describes different ways in which file information is disguised.
Examples of obfuscated file names, file paths, and titles
Actual file details on the monitored client computer
ﾉ Expand table
Example File name File path Title
#1 Resume_Contoso.xlsx C:\Users\John\Documents Resume_Contoso.docx
#2 Merger_Contoso.docx \\FileShare\Operations\FY2018 Merger_Contoso.docx
#3 FY2018_Merger.xlsx https://sharepoint/sites/HR/SharedDocuments FY2018_Merger.xlsx
#4 10 cures for Outlook:C:\Users\John\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary 10 cures for diseases

diseases.pptx Internet Files\Content.Outlook\1234ABCD
Data that is sent to the shared folder after you enable file obfuscation.
ﾉ Expand table
Example File name File path Title
#1 Re*.xlsx C:\* *
#2 Me*.docx \\FileShare\* *
#3 FY*.xlsx https://sharepoint/* *
#4 10*.pptx Outlook:* *
To enable file obfuscation by using the registry

The following example enables file obfuscation in the registry of a client computer. Save this code sample as a
.reg file and then run it on the monitored client computers.
Console

For more information about how to use .reg files, see How to add, modify, or delete registry subkeys and
values by using a registration entries (.reg) file .
To enable file obfuscation by using Group Policy settings

The following table describes the name and path of the Group Policy setting that enables file obfuscation. You
can download the Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Office from the Microsoft Download
Center .
Group Policy setting that enables file obfuscation
ﾉ Expand table
Setting name Path
Turn on privacy settings in Office User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office

Telemetry Agent 2016\Telemetry Dashboard
Prevent certain applications or solutions from being reported in

For business groups with employees handling trade secrets or sensitive data, you can prevent the collection
and upload of information about specific Office applications or Office solution types to the shared folder. For
example, a business group might decide that Excel files are too sensitive for monitoring. Another group might
decide that they care only about Access-related solutions and that they don't want to monitor other
applications.
To configure exclusion settings by using the registry

The following table describes the registry values that prevent specific applications from being reported to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OSM\preventedapplications
ﾉ Expand table
Value name Value type Value description and data
accesssolution REG_DWORD Prevents data for specific Office applications from being reported to Office Telemetry
Dashboard. The agent won't report any data that interacts with the specified
olksolution application. This includes document files that are used by the application and COM
add-ins that are loaded the application. The value names correspond to Office
onenotesolution applications as follows:
pptsolution accesssolution: Access solutions

projectsolution olksolution: Microsoft Outlook solutions
publishersolution onenotesolution: OneNote solutions
visiosolution pptsolution: PowerPoint solutions
wdsolution projectsolution: Project solutions
xlsolution publishersolution: Publisher solutions
visiosolution: Visio solutions
wdsolution: Word solutions
xlsolution: Excel solutions
Value:
0 = Allow reporting
The following table describes the registry values that prevent specific solution types from being reported to

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\16.0\OSM\preventedsolutiontypes
ﾉ Expand table
agave REG_DWORD Prevents data for specific solutions from being reported to Office Telemetry Dashboard.
appaddins The value names correspond to Office solution types as follows:
comaddins agave: apps for Office
documentfiles appaddins: Application-specific add-ins. These include Excel add-ins such as .xla and xlam,
Word add-ins such as .dotm, and PowerPoint add-ins such as .ppa and .ppam.
templatefiles
comaddins: COM add-ins
documentfiles: Office document files
templatefiles: Office template files
Value:
0 = Allow reporting

The following example disables reporting for all solution and application types. Save this sample as a .reg file
and then remove any applications or solutions that you want to allow reporting for. Otherwise they'll all be
disabled because their value is set to 00000001.
Console

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\microsoft\office\16.0\osm\preventedapplications]
"accesssolution"=dword:00000001
"olksolution"=dword:00000001
"onenotesolution"=dword:00000001
"pptsolution"=dword:00000001
"projectsolution"=dword:00000001
"publishersolution"=dword:00000001
"visiosolution"=dword:00000001
"wdsolution"=dword:00000001
"xlsolution"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\microsoft\office\16.0\osm\preventedsolutiontypes]
"agave"=dword:00000001
"appaddins"=dword:00000001
"comaddins"=dword:00000001
"documentfiles"=dword:00000001
"templatefiles"=dword:00000001
To configure exclusion settings by using Group Policy settings

The following table describes the name and path of the Group Policy settings that exclude reporting for
selected Office applications and solutions. You can download the Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML)
for Office from the Microsoft Download Center .
Exclusion policy settings under User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office

2016\Telemetry Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Setting Description
Office applications to exclude from Office Prevents data for specific Office applications from being reported to
Telemetry Agent reporting Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Office solutions to exclude from Office Telemetry Prevents data for specific Office solutions from being reported to
Agent reporting Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Disable data collection for the agent

To stop collecting data on the local computer, update the registry or set Group Policy settings as follows.
To stop logging by using the registry

The following example stops logging and uploading by the agent. Save the example as a .reg file and run it on
the client computer.
Console

To stop logging by using the Group Policy settings

The policy settings that are listed in the following table are available in the path User
Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Microsoft Office 2016\Telemetry Dashboard. Set these
policy settings to Disabled to turn off data collection and uploading for the agent. You can download the
Administrative Template files (ADMX/ADML) for Office from the Microsoft Download Center .
Agent policy settings that disable logging
ﾉ Expand table
Setting Description
Turn on telemetry data collection Set this setting to Disabled to turn off data collection.
Turn on data uploading for Office Telemetry Set this setting to Disabled to stop uploading data to the shared
Agent folder.
Delete data that is stored on client computers

Disabling logging doesn't delete the data that is already collected from a computer. To delete this data on the
local client computer, delete the files evt.tbl, sln.tbl, user.tbl that are located under
%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Telemetry.
Related articles
Data collected by the agent for Office Telemetry Dashboard
Feedback

Custom reporting and database schema
reference for Office Telemetry
Dashboard
Article • 05/20/2024
） Important

The built-in worksheets in Office Telemetry Dashboard display lots of useful data, but
sometimes you want more control over how the data is displayed. To do this, you can
use the custom reporting feature in Office Telemetry Dashboard. This feature uses
PivotTable reports to help give you a deeper view into how Office is being used in your
organization. In this article, you can learn how to create custom reports, and you can
find information about the database tables and fields that are used in custom reports.
） Important

Apps.
Overview of custom reports in Office Telemetry

Dashboard
The built-in worksheets in Office Telemetry Dashboard show you a relevant subset of the
data that is collected by the agents. However, the built-in worksheets aren't
customizable, and you might want to see a combined view of data that appears on
different worksheets. This is where custom reporting can help you use PivotTable reports
to view data in meaningful ways.
For example, the following screenshot shows a custom report that lists the unregistered
ActiveX controls that are detected on monitored clients. You can see that we've added
fields to display the solution name, user name, and business group (as configured for
Label 2 when the agents were deployed). This report helps us identify the solutions that
use unregistered ActiveX controls and who is using them. In contrast, the Documents
worksheet lists these solutions but doesn't have a column to indicate whether
unregistered ActiveX controls are detected. You have to view the Document sessions
worksheet for each document to see whether ActiveX controls are being used.
Custom report that shows unregistered ActiveX solutions

） Important
To use labels in custom reports, you have to configure them when you deploy the
agents. If you haven't already done this, we recommend that you carefully plan
labels that support the types of custom reporting that you'll do. For example,
setting labels to identify business groups, locations, and job roles can help you find
trends and issues for specific groups or types of users. Enabling and configuring
the agent will help you configure labels (known as tags in the Group Policy settings
and registry settings for the agent).
As another example, the following screenshot shows the list of Office client computers
as displayed in the Deployments worksheet. This shows a high-level summary of Office
deployments. But it doesn't give you a breakdown of how Office is deployed across
business groups.
The Deployments worksheet

You can get a more detailed view of Office clients by using a custom report. In the
following illustration, the Office clients are grouped by business groups (as configured
for Label 2) so that you can see the breakdown of Office deployments across each
group. You can also create a PivotChart to help show the data. This custom report uses a
hidden table, System_details, that you have to manually add before you can add Office
versions to your report. You can learn how to do this in Hidden tables in Office
Telemetry Dashboard custom reports.
Custom report showing Office deployments by business group

Create custom reports in Office Telemetry
Dashboard
You can create a single custom report on the Custom report worksheet. This
automatically loads the default tables and creates a basic custom report that you can
use as a starting point. Then, you can add and remove fields to design a report that
meets your business needs. For performance reasons, not all tables are loaded
automatically when you create a custom report. You can add tables by using the
procedure in Hidden tables in Office Telemetry Dashboard custom reports. The most
common reason to add hidden tables is to gain access to Office builds, which are
available in the System_details table.
In this video demo, you can see custom reporting in action. We compare data that is
shown in the Solutions worksheet to similar data that is shown in a custom report. This
video will also help you learn how to add and move fields in a PivotTable report.
Custom reporting in Office Telemetry Dashboard

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/ed8327e4-c063-40f5-a634-
230c067d73b4?autoplay=false&postJsllMsg=true
versions of Office.
If you use large data sets in your custom reports, you might encounter the 2-GB
memory limitation when you use the 32-bit version of Excel. There are a couple ways
that you can work around this limitation:
Use the 64-bit version of Excel, which doesn't have the 2-GB memory limitation,
but does have other drawbacks. See Choose between the 64-bit or 32-bit version
of Office to learn more.
Change the reporting threshold in the database to control the amount of data
pulled into PowerPivot for custom reports. Learn more about this setting in How to
configure privacy and performance settings in Office Telemetry Dashboard.
To create a custom report, you have to first start Office Telemetry Dashboard. The
following table describes how to start the dashboard in different versions of Windows.
To start Office Telemetry Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
If you have this Follow these steps to start Office Telemetry Dashboard
operating system
Windows 10, Windows 7, From the Start menu, choose All Programs, then Microsoft Office
or Windows Server 2008 2016 Tools, then Telemetry Dashboard for Office 2016.
R2
Windows 8.1 On the Start screen, type Telemetry Dashboard, and then choose it
from the search results.
Windows Server 2012 or Swipe in from the right edge to show the charm bar, and then choose
Windows Server 2012 R2 Search to see all the apps that are installed on the computer. Next,
choose Telemetry Dashboard for Office 2016.
７ Note
Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 ended on January 14,
2020.
To create a custom report

1. In Office Telemetry Dashboard, on the Getting Started worksheet, choose Connect
to Database.
2. In the Data connection settings dialog box, type the names of the computer
running SQL Server and the SQL database that you specified when you installed
Office Telemetry Processor.
3. In the navigation pane, choose Custom report.
4. On the Custom report worksheet, choose Create custom report.
To help you get started, the following tables provide procedures for creating different
kinds of custom reports.
Sample custom reports in Office Telemetry Dashboard
To create a custom report that shows solution stability, do the following:
1. From the Lookup_solutions table, drag Solution name to the FILTERS well.
2. After the Solution name field is added to the custom report, use the filter button
(next to the Solution name) to choose the solution.
3. From the Inventory table, drag Solution version to the ROWS well.
To create a custom report that shows Excel warnings, do the following:
1. From the Lookup_issue_definitions table, drag Severity to the FILTERS well.

2. After the Severity field is added to the custom report, use the filter button (next to
Severity) to choose Warning.
3. From the Lookup_solutions table, drag Application to the FILTERS well, and then
adjust the filter to select Excel.
4. From the Lookup_solutions table, drag File name to the ROWS well.
Default tables and fields in Office Telemetry
Dashboard custom reports
The following tables describe the six tables and their related fields that are shown by
default in the PivotTable Fields list when you create custom reports.
Default tables
ﾉ Expand table
Table name Description
Events Contains issue events for the past three months.
Inventory Contains unique instance data, such as load time and solution version,
about the Office documents and solutions that are monitored.
Lookup_computers Contains information about the computers that are monitored. This
includes computer name, domain, hardware information, and
Windows version.
Table name Description
Lookup_issue_definitions Contains information about the issues that were detected, such as
issue type, issue title, severity, and explanation.
Lookup_solutions Contains information about solutions that were detected, such as

solution type, name, and publisher.
Lookup_users Contains information about the users who use monitored client
computers, such as their user name, domain, and label settings.
The following table lists the fields in the Events table.
Fields in the Events table
ﾉ Expand table
Field name Type Description
Event ID Number The primary key for this table.
Issue ID Number Connects to the Lookup_issue_definitions table.
You can view these definitions in the following articles:
- Compatibility issues in Office

- Troubleshooting Office files and custom solutions with the
telemetry log (see Table 2)
Inventory ID String Connects to the Inventory table.
Solution ID Number Connects to the Lookup_solutions table.
User ID Number Connects to the Lookup_users table.
Computer ID Number Connects to the Lookup_computers table.
Event date Date/time Shows the date and time of the event.
Application version String Shows the version of the Office application that triggered the
(detail) event.
The following table lists the fields in the Inventory table.
Fields in the Inventory table
ﾉ Expand table
Inventory ID Strings The primary key for this table.
Solution ID Numbers Connects to the Lookup_solutions table.
User ID Numbers Connects to the Lookup_users table.
Computer ID Numbers Connects to the Lookup_computers table.
Friendly name Strings Shows the friendly name of the solution.
Location Strings Shows the file location of the file.
Load time (seconds) Numbers Shows the load time of the solution in seconds.
Title Strings Shows the title of the document.
Author Strings Shows the author of the document.
CPU architecture Strings Shows the CPU architecture.
Solution version Strings Shows the solution version.
Load behavior Numbers Shows the load behavior of the COM add-ins as follows:
0 - Do not load automatically (Unloaded)

1 - Do not load automatically (Loaded)
2 - Load at startup (Unloaded)
3 - Load at startup (Loaded)
8 - Load on demand (Unloaded)
9 - Load on demand (Loaded)
16 - Load first time, and then load on demand (Loaded)
File size (bytes) Numbers Shows the file size in bytes.
Has VBA Boolean Shows 1 if the document has VBA.
Has OLE Boolean Shows 1 if the document has OLE objects.
Has external data Boolean Shows 1 if the document has an external data connection.
connection
Has ActiveX control Boolean Shows 1 if the document has an ActiveX control.
Has assembly reference Boolean Shows 1 if the document has an assembly reference.
Has XML schema Boolean Shows 1 if the document has an XML schema.
Has XML expansion Boolean Shows 1 if the document has an XML expansion pack.
pack
Last loaded Date/time Shows the last date and time that the solution was loaded.
Last scanned Date/time Shows the last date and time that the computer was
scanned by the agent.
The following table shows the fields in the Lookup_computers table.
Fields in the Lookup_computers table
ﾉ Expand table
Computer ID Number The primary key for this table.
Computer name String Shows the computer name.
Computer domain String Shows the domain name that is registered for this
computer.
Telemetry Agent version String Shows the agent version that uploads the data to the
database.
Computer processor name String Shows the processor name of the computer.
Number of processors Number Shows the number of logical processors in the computer.
(logical)
Number of processors Number Shows the number of physical processors in the

(physical) computer.
System type String Shows the architecture type (32-bit or 64-bit) of the
computer.
Computer installed Number Shows amount of memory (in megabytes) that is

memory installed in this computer.
Display resolution String Shows this computer's screen resolution (for example,
1280 x 780).
Display resolution (width) Number Shows the screen resolution width.
Display resolution (height) Number Shows the screen resolution height.
Windows version String Shows the Windows version of the computer.
Windows version (detail) String Shows Windows version in detail.
Windows system locale String Shows the system locale setting for Windows.
Windows system display String Shows system display language for Windows.
language
IE version String Shows the Internet Explorer version.
IE version (detail) String Shows the Internet Explorer version in detail.
The following table shows the fields in the Lookup_solutions table.
Fields in the Lookup_solutions table
ﾉ Expand table
Solution ID Number The primary key for this table.
Solution type String Shows the solution or document type.
Application String Shows the application that used this solution or document.
Solution name String Shows the solution name.
File name String Shows the solution or document file name.
ProgID String Shows the solution ProgID.
Publisher String Shows the solution or document publisher name.
The following table shows the fields in the Lookup_users table.
Fields in the Lookup_users table
ﾉ Expand table
User ID Number The primary key for this table.
User name String Shows the user name.
User domain String Shows the domain name for this user.
Label 1 String Shows the Label 1 setting.

The following table shows the fields in the Lookup_issue_definitions table.
Fields in the Lookup_issue_definitions table
ﾉ Expand table
Issue ID Number The primary key for this table.
Severity String Shows the severity of issue.
Issue type String Shows the issue type.
Issue title String Shows the issue title.
Explanation String Shows the issue explanation.
More info String Shows the URL where you can get more information.
Hidden tables in Office Telemetry Dashboard

custom reports
Not all tables are loaded when you create a custom report. If you want to access more
data for your custom report, you can load the Usage_summary, Issue_summary, and
System_details tables. Follow these steps to add these hidden tables to Office Telemetry
Dashboard.
To add hidden tables to Office Telemetry Dashboard

1. Follow the steps in Create custom reports in Office Telemetry Dashboard to start
Office Telemetry Dashboard, connect to the database, and create a custom report.
2. After you create the custom report, select any area in the custom report. This
makes the ANALYZE tab available on the ribbon.
3. On the ANALYZE tab (under PIVOTTABLE TOOLS) on the ribbon, in the Data
group, select Change Data Source, and then select Connection Properties.
4. In the Workbook Connections for Custom report dialog box, select Telemetry
Dashboard - Custom report, select Properties, and then select the Definition tab.
5. In the Command text box, add the following text (don't delete or overwrite the
existing text): ,"Usage_summary", "Issue_summary", "System_details"
6. Choose OK, and on each dialog box, select Close.
7. In the PivotTable Fields list, Choose ALL, and then scroll down to see the newly
added tables for Usage_summary, Issue_summary, and System_details.
8. Right-click each new table, and choose Show in Active Tab. The new tables are
added to the Active list under PivotTable Fields in the right column for easier
access.
The following tables list the hidden tables that you have to manually add to Office
Telemetry Dashboard and describe the fields in the hidden tables.
Hidden tables in Office Telemetry Dashboard custom reports
ﾉ Expand table
Table name Comments
Usage_summary Shows data for seven days, one month, and three months. You can use this
table to create a relationship to the following tables to see more details:
- Inventory
- Lookup_computers
- Lookup_solutions
- Lookup_users
Issue_summary Shows the issues that have occurred in the last seven days, one month, and
three months. You can use this table to create a relationship to following tables
to see more details:
- Inventory
- Lookup_computers
- Lookup_issue_definitions
- Lookup_solutions
- Lookup_users
System_details Shows user and computer information.
The following table describes the fields in the Usage_summary table.
Fields in the Usage_summary table
ﾉ Expand table
Inventory ID String Connects to the Inventory table to gain access to more details in
the PivotTable report.
Solution ID Number Connects to the Lookup_solutions table to obtain more details in

PivotTable report if there's no relationship between the Inventory
and Lookup_solutions tables.
User ID Number Connects to the Lookup_users table to obtain more details in the
and Lookup_users tables.
Computer ID Number Connects to the Lookup_computers table to obtain more details in

and Lookup_computers tables.
Total session (last Number Shows the total number of sessions in the last seven days.
seven days)
Total session (last Number Shows the total number of sessions in the last one month.
one month)
Total session (last Number Shows the total number of sessions in the last three months.
three months)
Failed session Number Shows the total number of sessions that had an issue in last the
(last seven days) seven days.
Failed session Number Shows the total number of sessions that had an issue in the last
(last one month) one month.
Failed session Number Shows the total number of sessions that had an issue in the last
(last three three months.
months)
The following table describes the fields in the Issue_summary table.
Fields in the Issue_summary table
ﾉ Expand table
Issue ID Number Connects to the Lookup_issue_definitions table to obtain more

details in the PivotTable report.
Inventory ID String Connects to the Inventory table to obtain more details in the
PivotTable report.
Solution ID Number Connects to the Lookup_solutions table to obtain more details in

the PivotTable report if there's no relationship between the
Inventory and Lookup_solutions tables.
User ID Number Connects to the Lookup_users table to obtain more details in the
and Lookup_users tables.
Computer ID Number Connects to the Lookup_computers table to obtain more details

in the PivotTable report if there's no relationship between the
Inventory and Lookup_computers tables.
Number of Number Shows the number of issue events in the last seven days.
instances (last
seven days)
Number of Number Shows the number of issue events in the last one month.
instances (last one
month)
Number of Number Shows the number of issue events in the last three months.
instances (last
three months)
The following table describes the fields in the System_details table.
Fields in the System_details table
ﾉ Expand table
Computer name String Shows the computer name.
Computer domain String Shows the domain name that is registered for this
computer.
User name String Shows the user name.
User domain String Shows the domain name for this user.

Telemetry Agent version String Shows the version of agent that collected this data.
Telemetry Processor (file String Shows the file share for the processor that uploaded
share) data to the database.
Telemetry Processor String Shows the computer name for the processor that
(computer) uploaded data to the database.
Computer processor String Shows the processor name of the computer.

name
Number of processors Number Shows the number of logical processors in the

(logical) computer.
Number of processors Number Shows the number of physical processors in the

(physical) computer.
System type String Shows the system type of the computer.
Computer installed Number Shows amount of memory (in megabytes) that is

memory installed in this computer.
Display resolution String Shows this computer's screen resolution (for example,
1280 x 780).
Display resolution (width) Number Shows the screen resolution width.
Display resolution Number Shows the screen resolution height.

(height)
Windows version String Shows the Windows version of the computer.
Windows version (detail) String Shows Windows version details.
Windows system locale String Shows the system locale setting for Windows.
Windows system display String Shows the system display language setting for Windows.
language
IE version String Shows the Internet Explorer version.
IE version (details) String Shows the Internet Explorer version in detail.
Windows system local String Shows the Windows system local setting (user setting).
(user)
Windows display String Shows the Windows system display language (user
language (user) setting).
Last scanned Date/time Shows the agent scanned date/time.

Office 2003 String Shows Office 2003 version details, if it's installed.
Office 16 String Shows Office 2019 or Office 2016 version details, if it's
installed.
Default data relationships in Office Telemetry

Dashboard custom reports
The following illustrations show the relationships between tables in the database.
Default relationships between tables in the database
The Usage_summary table and its relationships

The Issue_summary table and its relationships
Related articles
Feedback

Data collected by the agent for Office
Telemetry Dashboard
Article • 03/01/2023
） Important

The Office Telemetry Dashboard uses an agent to collect several types of inventory,
usage, and health data for installations of Office, such as the following:
The file names of Office files that are in the Most Recently Used list.
The names of add-ins and solutions that interact with Office.
System information such as user name and computer name.
The agent collects different kinds of information for different applications as applicable.
For example, for Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word, the agent collects data that
allows you to determine:
Whether the document has specific metadata for a particular file, such VBA
macros, data connections, or ActiveX controls.
Whether the document has encountered compatibility issues or critical errors while
it is being used.
How Office files and solutions are used on a user's computer. Data of this type that
is gathered by the agent is referred to as session data.
The agent doesn't collect any of the following kinds of information:
The contents of files.

Information about files that are not in the Most Recently Used list.
） Important

Apps.
Office applications from which the agent

collects data
The agent collects inventory-related data, hardware and software data, and user data in
Office 2019, Office 2016, Office 2013, Office 2010, Office 2007, and Office 2003 for the
following applications:
Access
Excel
OneNote
Outlook
PowerPoint
Project
Publisher
Visio
Word
７ Note
Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, and Office 2013 are no longer supported.
For Office 2019, Office 2016, and Office 2013 only, the agent collects data for the
following applications:
Excel
Outlook
PowerPoint
Word
Data that is collected by the agent for all

computers that it monitors
The agent collects the following data for all computers that it monitors. This data
includes inventory data, user data, and hardware and software data. You can find the list
of Office versions and operating systems that the agent supports in Office Telemetry
Dashboard agent.
Data about recently opened Office documents and

templates
The agent collects the following data about recently opened Office documents and
templates. This data is sorted by the worksheet where it appears in Office Telemetry
Dashboard.
Documents worksheet:
File name
File format (extension)
Total users
Number of Office
Document details worksheet:
User name
Computer name
Location
Size (KB)
Author
Last loaded
Title
Office version
Exceptions to data collected about recently opened Office documents and templates
For OneNote, the agent collects only Notebook name and location.
For Outlook, the agent doesn't collect any inventory data of document files.
For files that are stored in a network share or SharePoint site, the agent collects
only the file name and location.
If the list of most recently used documents is disabled on a user's computer (by
Group Policy or the user disabled it by themselves), the agent doesn't collect
inventory data for document files and templates.
Data about recently loaded add-ins and apps for Office

The agent collects the following data about recently loaded add-ins and apps for Office.
This data is sorted by the worksheet where it appears in Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Solutions worksheet:
Solution name
Total users
Number of Office users
Solution details worksheet:
User name
Computer name
Solution version
Architecture (CPU architectures: x86/x64/ARM)
Load time
Description
Size (KB)
Location (.dll/manifest file path)
User data
The agent collects the following user data. This data appears in the Agents worksheet.
User name
Level
Computer
Last updated
Label (1-4)
Version of the agent
Data about hardware and software

The agent collects the following data about hardware and software. This data is sorted
by the worksheet where it appears in Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Telemetry Processor worksheet:
Computer name
Level
Users
Computers
Last updated (date and time)
Deployments worksheet:
Office versions
Number of 32-bit deployments
Number of 64-bit deployments
Number of ARM deployments
Data that is collected only for Office 2019,

Office 2016, and Office 2013
In Office 2019, Office 2016, and Office 2013, the agent also collects the following data
for Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. This data is sorted by the worksheet where it
appears in Office Telemetry Dashboard.
Data is collected during application run time. If the inventory data was collected by the
agent, but the application hasn't started collecting data, then some data, such as
Success (%) and Load time, won't be shown in the dashboard until the user opens
documents or loads solutions during application run time.
Documents worksheet:
Success (%)
Sessions
Critical compatibility issue or crash
Informative compatibility issue or load failure
Document details worksheet:
VBA, OLE, external data connection, ActiveX control, and assembly reference information
are logged starting from the second time that the user opens the document. This
information won't be collected if the user opens the document only one time.
Last loaded date and time
Has VBA? (true/false)
Has OLE? (true/false)
Has external data connection? (true/false)
Has assembly reference? (true/false)
Document sessions worksheet:
Date and time that the critical or informative event happened
Solutions worksheet:
Success (%)
Sessions
Critical compatibility issue or crash
Informative compatibility issue or load failure
Load time (time taken to load add-ins or apps for Office)
Solution issues worksheet:
Event ID
Title
Explanation
More info
Users
Sessions
Related topics
Document and solution types
monitored by Office Telemetry
Dashboard
Article • 02/25/2023
The following table lists the document and solution types that Office Telemetry
Dashboard monitors in Office 2019 and Office 2016.
Type Office Description

Applications
Active Word, Active documents are any Office document files that aren't included
Documents PowerPoint, in the other solution types that are listed in this table. These files
Excel can include the following types:
- Office binary format files (.doc, .ppt, .pps, .xls)

- Office OpenXML format files (.docx, .pptx, .ppsx, .xlsx)
- Macro-enabled files that contain VBA code (.docm, .dotm, .pptm,
.potm, .xlsm, .xltm)
- Files that contain ActiveX controls
- Files that have External Data Connections
COM add- Word, COM add-ins include Microsoft Office development tools in
ins PowerPoint, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 application-level add-ins.
Excel
Excel Excel This solution type includes earlier versions of Excel-supported

Automation Automation add-ins, which are built upon COM add-ins. Functions
add-ins in Automation add-ins can be called from formulas in Excel
worksheets.
Excel XLL Excel XLL add-ins (.xll) are specific to Excel and are built with any compiler
add-ins that supports building DLLs (dynamic-link libraries). They don't have
to be installed or registered. XLL add-ins also include DLLs that
contain user-defined commands and functions.
Excel XLS Excel XLS real-time data (RTD) add-ins are Excel worksheets that use the
RTD add- RealTimeData worksheet function to call an Automation server to
ins retrieve data in real time.
Word WLL Word WLL (.wll) add-ins are specific to Word and built with any compiler
add-ins that supports building DLLs.
Type Office Description
Applications
Application Word, Application add-ins are application-specific files that contain VBA
add-ins PowerPoint, code. These include macro-enabled Word templates (.dotm), Excel
Excel add-ins (.xla, .xlam), and PowerPoint add-ins (.ppa, .ppam).
Templates Word Templates include document (.dot, .dotx), worksheet (.xlt, .xltx), or
presentation (.pot, .potx) templates that are attached to an Office
file.
apps for Word, These are apps for Office that are hosted in a task pane, content, or
Office PowerPoint, email within the client application. To learn more, see Office Add-ins
Excel platform overview.
Related articles
Article • 05/21/2024
） Important

As you use Office Telemetry Dashboard to investigate stability issues for Office
documents and Office solutions, you might need more information about the data that
is displayed in the worksheets. Use this article as a guide to help understand the data
that is shown in Office Telemetry Dashboard. This data helps you identify stability issues
for Office documents and solutions and helps you track Office deployments. You can
also use this data to identify problems with the agents and processors used by Office
） Important

Apps.
Overview worksheet
The Overview worksheet provides a large picture view of both the stability and
deployment status of Office within your organization. By using this worksheet, you can
quickly understand how your critical documents and solutions are behaving on users'
computers. Instead of browsing the Documents and Solutions worksheets, which show
you item-by-item status, you can open and refresh the Overview worksheet to see a
high-level view of document and solution stability. The following screenshot shows the
Overview worksheet:
Overview worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
There are three primary tasks that you can perform on the Overview worksheet.
Determine the overall stability of Office documents and solutions throughout your
organization
Drill down to investigate unstable documents or solutions that require your

attention
View the progress of Office deployments in your organization

Documents worksheet
The Documents worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard displays the list of documents
that was collected by logging and by agent scans. In this worksheet, you can find
frequently used documents and data about them.
The following screenshot shows the Documents worksheet.
Documents worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
There are two main sections on the Documents worksheet:
Office usage
Office 2016 and later telemetry data
The columns under the Office usage section display usage data that is collected by the
agent for Office Telemetry Dashboard. You can select the link for the number of users of
a document to see who is using the document. This information is displayed in the
Document details worksheet.
The columns under the Office 2016 and later telemetry data section display data that is
collected by logging. You can select the link for the number of users who hit critical or
informative issues to see more details. This information is displayed in the Document
issues worksheet.
The following table describes each column in the Documents worksheet.

７ Note
By default, some columns are collapsed and not visible. Select the [+] symbols on
the top row to expand the columns.
Column descriptions for the Documents worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Section Column Description
Office usage File name Shows the file name of each document.
Total users Shows the number of users who opened each document by
using Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, Office 2013, Office
2016, or Office 2019.
Office 2003 Shows the number of users who opened each document by
using Office 2003.
using Office 2007.
using Office 2010.
using Office 2013.
and later using Office 2016 or Office 2019.
Office 2003 Shows the number of computers on which users opened each
(computers) document by using Office 2003
(computers) document by using Office 2007.
and later document by using Office 2016 or Office 2019.
(computers)
Office 2016 Success (%) Shows the percentage of successfully opened documents (no
and later critical errors occurred) out of the total number of sessions.
telemetry
data
Sessions Shows the total number of sessions. A session refers to all

selected file open events.
Trend Shows the trend of changes that occurred between the current
week and a week within the selected period. You can change
the period by using the Date range filter in the navigation
pane. For example, if you select 1 year from the Date range, the
column shows a trend that compares the current week to a
week from one year prior.
Critical Shows the number of users who encountered critical issues.
Critical issues Shows the number of unique critical issues.
Informative Shows the number of users who encountered informative

issues.
Informative Shows the number of unique informative issues.

issues
Application Shows the name of the application that was used to open each
document.
Extension Shows the file name extensions that were used to open each
document.
Built-in Indicates whether each document is included with Office or has

a default file name that is used for Office documents. You can
use the filter for this column to hide built-in documents so that
you can see the unique documents in your organization.
The following sections describe worksheets that help you drill down into specific issues.
These worksheets appear after you select links within the Documents worksheet.
Document details worksheet

The Document details worksheet appears after you select a link under Office usage on
the Documents worksheet. The Document details worksheet helps you see which users
are frequently using a document.
The following screenshot shows the Documents details worksheet.

Document details worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
The following table describes each column in the Document details worksheet.
Column descriptions for the Documents details worksheet in Office Telemetry

Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Column Description
User name Displays the name of the user who used the document.
User domain Displays the domain name for this user.
Computer name Displays the computer name that was used to open the document.
Computer Shows the computer's domain name.

domain
Location Shows the file path of the document.
Only one file path is kept per user and computer. If the same user opens the
document from a different file path on the same computer, only the most
recent file path is kept.
Size (KB) Shows the file size of the document.
Author Shows the author name of the document.

Column Description
VBA Indicates whether the document contains VBA code.
OLE Indicates whether the document contains OLE objects.
External data Indicates whether the document has an external data connection.
connection
ActiveX control Indicates whether the document contains ActiveX controls.
Assembly Indicates whether the document contains VSTO document-level

reference customizations.
Last loaded Indicates when the document was most recently loaded.
Title Shows the title of the document.
Office version Shows the version of Office that was used to open the document.
Document issues worksheet

The Document issues worksheet appears after you select a link under Office 2016 and
later telemetry data on the Documents worksheet. The Document issues worksheet
helps you find details about unique events that were found for a document.
The following screenshot shows the Document issues worksheet.
Document issues worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard

The following table describes each column in the Document issues worksheet.
Column descriptions for the Documents issues worksheet in Office Telemetry

Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Column Description
Event ID Displays the Event ID. For more information about the event IDs, see "Table 2. Types
of events displayed in the Telemetry Log" in Troubleshooting Office files and custom
solutions with the telemetry log.
Title Shows the title of the issue.
Explanation Describes the issue.
More info Provides a link to more information.
Users Shows total number of users who encountered the issue.
Sessions Shows total number of sessions that encountered the issue.
Document sessions worksheet

The Document sessions worksheet shows the sessions during which an issue occurred.
You can open this worksheet by selecting a link in the Sessions column of the
Document issues worksheet.
The following screenshot shows the Documents sessions worksheet.
Document sessions worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
The following table describes each column in the Document sessions worksheet.
Column descriptions for the Documents sessions worksheet in Office Telemetry

Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Column Description
Event ID Displays the Event ID. For more information about the event IDs, see "Table 2.
Types of events displayed in the Telemetry Log" in Troubleshooting Office files
and custom solutions with the telemetry log.
Event date Shows the date and time when the issue occurred.
User name Shows the names of users who were using the document that encountered the
issue.
User domain Shows the domain name for the user.

Column Description
Computer Shows the name of the computer where the document encountered the issue.
name

domain
Location Shows the file path where the selected document was opened.
document from a different file path on the same computer, only the most
recent file path is kept.
Office version Shows the version of Office that was used to open this document.
Documents Shows the list of documents that were being used when the issue occurred.
loaded
Size (KB) Shows the size of the document.
Author Shows the name of the author of the document.
VBA Indicates whether the document contains VBA code.
OLE Indicates whether the document contains OLE objects.
External data Indicates whether the document has an external data connection.
connection
ActiveX control Indicates whether the document contains ActiveX controls.
Assembly Indicate whether the document contains VSTO document-level customization.

reference
Title Shows the title of the document.
Solutions worksheet
The Solutions worksheet displays the list of solutions that was collected by logging and
agent scans. In this worksheet, you can find frequently used solutions and data about
them. The kinds of solutions that are shown include COM add-ins, application-specific
add-ins, and apps for Office.
The following screenshot shows the Solutions worksheet.
Solutions worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard

After data is collected, you can manage Office add-ins by using the Add-in
management mode link on the Solutions worksheet. For more information, see Let's
manage add-ins using Telemetry Dashboard.
There are two main sections on the Solutions worksheet:
Office usage
Office 2016 and later telemetry data
The columns under the Office usage section display the usage data that is collected by
the agent for Office Telemetry Dashboard. You can select the link for the number of
users of a solution to see who is using the solution. This information is displayed on the
Solution details worksheet.
The columns under the Office 2016 and later telemetry data section display data that is
collected by logging. You can select the link for the number of users who hit critical or
informative issues to see more details. This information is displayed on the Solution
issues worksheet.
The following table describes each column in the Solutions worksheet.
７ Note
By default, some columns are collapsed and not visible. Select the [+] symbols on
the top row to expand the columns.
Column descriptions for the Solutions worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Office usage Total users Shows the number of users who use the solution in Office
2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, Office 2013, Office 2016, or
Office 2019.
Office 2003 Shows the number of users who use the solution in Office
2003.
2007.
2010.
2013.
Office 2016 Shows the number of users who use the solution in Office 2016
and later or Office 2019.
Total Shows the number of computers where the solution was

computers opened by using Office 2003, Office 2007, Office 2010, Office
2013, Office 2016, or Office 2019.
Office 2003 Shows the number of computers where the solution was
(computers) opened by using Office 2003.
and later opened by using Office 2016 or Office 2019.
(computers)
Office 2016 Success (%) Shows the percentage of successfully opened solutions (no
and later critical error occurred) out of total sessions.
telemetry
data
Sessions Shows the total number of sessions. A session refers to all

selected file open events.
Trend Shows the trend of changes that occurred between this week
and a week within the selected period. You can change the
period by using the Date range filter in the navigation pane.
For example, if you select 1 year from the Date range, the
column shows a trend that compares this week to a week from
one year prior.
Critical Shows the number of users who encountered critical issues
Critical issues Shows the number of unique critical issues.
Informative Shows the number of users who encountered informative

issues.
Informative Shows the number of unique informative issues.

issues
Load time Shows the average load time of the solution.
Application Shows the application name that was used to open the
selected solution.
Type Shows the solution type.
File Shows the file name of the solution.
Extension Shows the file name extensions of the solution.
Publisher Shows the publisher of the solution.
Built-in Indicates whether this solution is included with Office. You can
use the filter for this column to hide built-in solutions so that
you can see the unique solutions in your organization.
The following sections describe worksheets that help you drill down into specific issues.
These worksheets appear after you select links within the Solutions worksheet.
Solution details worksheet

The Solution details worksheet appears after you select a link under Office usage on
the Solutions worksheet. The Solution details worksheet helps you see which users are
frequently using a solution.
The following screenshot shows the Solution details worksheet.
Solution details worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
The following table describes each column in the Solution details worksheet.
Column description for the Solution details worksheet
ﾉ Expand table
Column Description
User name Shows the name of user who used the solution.
User domain Shows the domain name for this user.
Computer Shows the name of the computer where the solution was opened.
name

domain
Solution Shows the version of the solution.

version
Architecture Shows the architecture of the solution.
Load time Shows how long the solution took to load.

Column Description
Last loaded Shows the last time that the solution was loaded.
Load behavior Shows the load behavior of COM add-ins as follows:
0 - Don't load automatically (Unloaded)

1 - Don't load automatically (Loaded)
16 - Load first time, then load on demand (Loaded)
For more information, see Load behavior values.
Policy setting Shows the policy setting.
Office version Shows the Office version that was used to open the solution.
Author Shows the author name of the solution.
Friendly name Shows the friendly name of the solution.
Description Shows the description of the solution.
Size (KB) Shows the size of the solution.
Location Shows the file path of the solution. Only one file path is kept per user and
computer. If the same user opens the solution from different file path on the
same computer, only the most recent file path is kept.
Solution issues worksheet

The Solution issues worksheet appears after you select a link under Office 2016 and
later telemetry data on the Solutions worksheet. The Solution issues worksheet helps
you find details about the unique events that were found for a solution.
The following screenshot shows the Solution issues worksheet.
Solution issues worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard

The following table describes each column in the Solution issues worksheet.
Column descriptions for the Solution issues worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Column Description
Event ID Displays the Event ID. For more information about the event IDs, see "Table 2. Types
of events displayed in the Telemetry Log" in Troubleshooting Office files and custom
solutions with the telemetry log.
Title Shows the title of the issue.
Explanation Describes the issue.
More info Provides a link to more information.
Users Shows the number of users who encountered the issue.
Sessions Shows the number of sessions that encountered the issue.
Solution sessions worksheet

The Solution sessions worksheet shows the sessions during which the issue occurred.
You can open this worksheet by selecting a link in the Sessions column of the Solution
issues worksheet.
The following screenshot shows the Solution sessions worksheet.
Solution sessions worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
The following table describes each column in the Solution sessions worksheet.
Column descriptions for the Solution sessions worksheet in Office Telemetry

Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Column Description
Event ID Displays the Event ID. For more information about the event IDs, see "Table 2.
Types of events displayed in the Telemetry Log" in Troubleshooting Office files
and custom solutions with the telemetry log.
Event date Shows the date and time when the issue occurred.
User name Shows the names of users who were using the solution that encountered the
issue.
User domain Shows the domain name for the user.
Computer Shows the name of the computer where the solution encountered the issue.
name
Column Description

domain
Solution Shows the version of the solution.

version
Architecture Shows the architecture of the solution.
Office version Shows the Office version with build numbers that used this solution.
Load time Shows how long the solution took to load.
Load behavior Shows the load behavior of COM add-ins as follows:
0 - Do not load automatically (Unloaded)

1 - Do not load automatically (Loaded)
16 - Load first time, then load on demand (Loaded)
For more information, see Load behavior values.
Policy setting Shows the policy setting.
Document Shows the documents that were open when the issue occurred.
loaded
Author Shows the author name of the solution.
Friendly name Shows the friendly name of the solution.
Description Shows the description of the solution.
Size (KB) Shows the size of the solution.
Location Shows the file path of the solution.
solution from a different file path on the same computer, only the most recent
file path is kept.
Telemetry Processor worksheet

The Telemetry Processor worksheet displays information about the health of the Office
Telemetry Dashboard infrastructure. You can monitor whether processors are running
correctly, and you can check whether users' computers are sending data correctly.
The following screenshot shows the Telemetry Processor worksheet:
Telemetry Processor worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
The following table describes each column in the Telemetry Processor worksheet.
Column descriptions for the Telemetry Processor worksheet in Office Telemetry

Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Column Description
Computer Lists the names of computers that are running Telemetry Processor. You can select
name the computer name to see the users whose computers are sending data to each
processor. For more information about this feature, see the Agents worksheet later
in this article.
Level Shows the status of the processor. Depending on the status, you might want to
investigate if the processor is running correctly or if the agents on users'
computers are configured correctly and uploading data.
The levels are described in the next table.
Users Shows the number of users whose computers are connected to each processor.
Computers Shows the number of computers that connected to each processor.
Last Shows the last date and time when the processor inserted data into the database.
updated
The following table describes the status that is represented by the symbols that are
displayed in the Level column.
Icon descriptions for the Level column in the Telemetry Processor worksheet
ﾉ Expand table
Symbol Status description
The last updated date and time for the processor is less than a day ago.
5% or more of the users for this processor haven't uploaded data for the last 14 days.
Select the processor name to open the Agents worksheet so that you can view which
users' computers aren't sending data.
The last updated date and time for the processor is older than a day. When you see
this status, you should investigate whether the processor is running correctly on the
computer.
You find information about how to troubleshoot Office Telemetry Processor in

Troubleshooting Office Telemetry Dashboard deployments.
(No The last updated date and time for the processor was more than 14 days ago.
symbol)
７ Note
A processor is deleted from the Telemetry Processors worksheet if the Last

updated value for the processor is 90 or more days ago.
Agents worksheet
The Agents worksheet displays information about the users whose computers who are
uploading data to each processor. You can open the Agents worksheet by selecting a
link for a computer name on the Telemetry Processor worksheet. Use this worksheet to
monitor the upload status of each computer.
The following screenshot shows the Agents worksheet.
Agents worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard

The following table describes each column in the Agents worksheet.
Column descriptions for the Agents worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard
ﾉ Expand table
Column Description
name
User name Lists the names of users whose computers upload data to the processor.
Level Indicates how recently the agent uploaded data. The levels are described in the
next table.
Computer Lists the names of the computers that upload data.
Last updated Shows the last date and time when the user's computer uploaded data.
Label 1 - 4 Shows the tag values that are assigned to each user.
Version Shows the major and minor version of the agent that runs on the user's
computer.
The following table describes the status that is represented by the symbols that are
displayed in the Level column.
ﾉ Expand table
Symbol Status description
The last updated date and time for the user is less than a day ago.
The last updated date and time for the user is between 2 and 14 days ago.
Occasionally, you'll see this icon when the user's computer hasn't uploaded data for
more than a day (for example, Monday morning after the weekend).
The last updated date and time for the user is between 15 and 30 days ago. When you
see this status, you should investigate whether the agent on this user's computer is
configured correctly.
You find information about how to troubleshoot agents in Troubleshooting Telemetry

Dashboard deployments.
(No The last updated date and time for the processor was 31 or more days ago.
symbol)
７ Note
A user is deleted from the Agents worksheet if the Last updated value for the user
was 90 or more days ago.
Deployments worksheet
The Deployments worksheet provides a tabular view of the number of Office clients that
are deployed in your organization. This worksheet provides additional information for
the deployment trend chart that is shown in the Overview worksheet. This information
can help you plan for future Office deployments.
In the following screenshot of the Deployments worksheet, you can see how many
Office clients are deployed. The list is organized by Office version and CPU architecture.
For example, you can see how many users are running 32-bit versions of Office.
Deployments worksheet in Office Telemetry Dashboard

You can see that there are still 32-bit computers that are running Office 2003. You might
want to contact these users to understand if they have any concerns about how to
upgrade. You can also create a custom report to show more information about these
users, such as their computer hardware.
Also, you should be aware that Windows 8.1 is now supported on ARM-based
architectures. If your organization has users who have Office on these computers, you
can now keep track of that information in the Deployments worksheet. You can create
custom reports to obtain richer information about who is using these computers, what
issues they could be experiencing, and so on.
７ Note
Custom report worksheet

When you select the Create custom report button on the Custom report worksheet,
Telemetry Dashboard connects to multiple tables and creates relationships for you to
use in a PivotTable. If you never used a PivotTable before, you can learn more in Use
multiple tables to create a PivotTable .
Related articles
Feedback

Update Office Telemetry Dashboard
components
Article • 03/01/2023
） Important
Follow these steps only if you were using the Office Telemetry Dashboard in
Office 2013 and you're now moving to using the Office Telemetry Dashboard
in Office 2019 or Office 2016.
These steps aren't needed if you were using Office Telemetry Dashboard in
Office 2016 and are now moving to Office 2019.
When you install Office 2019 or Office 2016, Office Telemetry Dashboard and the built-in
agents are updated to the new versions automatically. However, the processors and the
database used by Office Telemetry Dashboard aren't updated, even if they are on the
same computer as Office 2019 or Office 2016.
To use the new version of Office Telemetry Dashboard, you'll have to update the
processors and database manually. If you don't, you'll see an error message similar to
the following when you use Office Telemetry Dashboard to connect to the database:
Database connection failure. The database needs to be updated.
You need to ensure that each computer on which you install the processors and
database is also running the latest version of the Universal C Runtime (CRT) for the
version of Windows running on the computer. For information, see Update for Universal
C Runtime in Windows .
Here are the procedures for uninstalling the old processors, installing the new
processors, and updating the database.
７ Note
Be sure that you get the list of processors before you install Office 2019 or Office
2016. You can find the list on the Telemetry Processor worksheet in Office
To uninstall the old version of the processor
1. On each computer where a processor is installed, uninstall the processor from the
Windows Control Panel. For example, on Windows 10, choose Start > Settings.
Then, choose System > Apps & Features.
2. In the list of programs, select Microsoft Office Telemetry Processor.
3. Select Uninstall, and then select Yes when you're prompted.
The following two procedures describe two options for installing the processor. Pick the
procedure that applies to your situation. Do this for each computer that's running a
processor.
Option 1: To install the processor on a

computer that's running Office 2019 or Office
2016
1. Ensure that the computer where you want to update the processor is also running
the latest version of the CRT. For more information, see Update for Universal C
Runtime in Windows .
2. On a computer where Office 2019 or Office 2016 is running, open Office Telemetry
Dashboard, and then select Let's get started.
3. On the Getting started worksheet, expand Step 2, and then select Install
Telemetry Processor on This Computer. This starts the Microsoft Office Telemetry
Processor Setup wizard.
4. Select Next in the wizard, and then select Yes in the User Account Control dialog
box, if you're prompted.
5. When installation is complete, select Finish, and then select Yes when you're
prompted. This will open the Office Telemetry Processor settings wizard, where
you can complete the next procedure, To configure the processor and update the
database, for each computer.
Option 2: To copy the processor to a computer

that isn't running Office 2019 or Office 2016
and install it
1. On a computer where Office 2019 or Office 2016 is running, open Office Telemetry
Dashboard, and then select Let's get started.
2. On the Getting started worksheet, expand Step 2, and then select the appropriate
version of the Save the Telemetry Processor MSI link (either x86 or x64) to save
the MSI file to the local computer.
3. Copy the MSI file to the computers that run a processor.
4. Ensure that each computer that runs a processor is also running the latest version
of the CRT. For more information, see Update for Universal C Runtime in
Windows .
5. On each computer that runs a processor, run the MSI file to start the Microsoft
Office Telemetry Processor wizard.
6. Select Next in the wizard, and then select Yes in the User Account Control dialog
box, if you're prompted.
7. When installation is complete, select Finish, and then select Yes when you're
prompted. This will open the Office Telemetry Processor settings wizard, where
you can complete the next procedure, To configure the processor and update the
database, for each computer.
Complete the next procedure for each computer that runs a processor. The Office
Telemetry Processor settings wizard is started as part of the previous procedures.
To configure the processor and update the

database
1. Select Next in the Office Telemetry Processor settings wizard.
2. On the Database Settings page, do the following:
a. Verify that the server selected in SQL server corresponds to the database that
you're updating for Office 2019 or Office 2016.
b. Select Connect to connect to the SQL Server computer.
c. Select the database in SQL database, and then select Next.
3. If you're prompted to update the database, select Yes. You'll only be prompted to
do this on the first computer where you run the Office Telemetry Processor
settings wizard.
4. Select Yes to set database permissions.
5. On the Shared Folder page, verify that the shared folder is correct, and then select
Next.
6. Select Yes to set shared folder permissions, and then complete the rest of the
wizard.
To connect Office Telemetry Dashboard to the

database after you upgrade
On a computer where Office 2019 or Office 2016 is running, open Office Telemetry
Dashboard, and then select Connect to Database to connect to the newly updated
database. The connection should be successful and you won't see an error message
about the database.
Related articles
Plan a deployment of Office Telemetry Dashboard
Manage compatibility mode for Office
Article • 03/01/2023
In Office, compatibility mode is used automatically to open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
documents that were created in earlier versions of these applications. Compatibility
mode ensures that no new or improved features in Office are available while users work
with a document so that people who use earlier versions of Office will have full editing
capabilities. Compatibility mode also preserves the layout of the document.
How Office uses compatibility mode

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint use compatibility mode to open binary Office documents
that were created in Office 2003 or earlier versions of Office. Word also uses
compatibility mode to open OpenXML documents that were created in Word 2007 and
Word 2010.
Set default compatibility mode on file creation

for Word
If you use Group Policy, you can use the Set default compatibility mode on file creation
policy setting to manage the default compatibility mode that Word uses to create new
Word documents. This might be necessary if you have add-ins or macros that use the
layout functions that are used in Word 2007 or Word 2010. When you enable this policy
setting, you can specify which versions of Word that new Word documents are
compatible with. Several configurations options are available for this setting:
Word 2003 This mode disables features in Word that are incompatible with Word
2003.
2007.
2010.
Full functionality mode This mode makes sure that all new features remain
enabled. This is the default setting for Word.
When you choose the Word 2003 option, Word is configured to create new Open XML
files that have Word 2007 and later features disabled. Doing so makes sure that the
Open XML files do not contain content that Word 2003 users can't edit. However, users
of Office 2003 must still have the Compatibility Pack installed before they can edit Word
Open XML files that are compatible with Word 2003.
If you select Full functionality mode, there is no effect on the Word 2007 and Word
2010 users. They can open and edit Word 2019, Word 2016, and Word 2013 documents.
The only difference is that new features in Word 2013 and later are not available in Word
2007 or Word 2010.
You can download the Group Policy Administrative Templates files (ADMX/ADML) for
Office from the Microsoft Download Center . The Set default compatibility mode on
file creation policy setting is located under User Configuration\Policies\Administrative
Templates\Microsoft Word 2016\Word Options\Save.
Related topics
File format reference for Word, Excel,
and PowerPoint
Article • 05/29/2024
Applies to: Office 2021, Office 2019, Office 2016
Supported file formats and their extensions are listed in the following tables for Word,
Excel, and PowerPoint.
File formats that are supported in Word

The following table describes the file formats that are supported in Word, alphabetized
by extension.
ﾉ Expand table
Extension Name of file Description

format
.doc Word 97-2003 The binary file format for Word 97-Word 2003.
Document
.docm Word Macro- The XML-based and macro-enabled file format for Word 2021,
Enabled Word 2019, Word 2016, Word 2013, Word 2010, and Office
Document Word 2007. Stores Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro
code.
.docx Word Document The default XML-based file format for Word 2021, Word 2019,
Word 2016, Word 2013, Word 2010, and Office Word 2007.
.docx Strict Open XML Conforms to the Strict profile of the Open XML standard
Document (ISO/IEC 29500). This profile of Open XML doesn't allow a set of
features that are designed specifically for backward-
compatibility with existing binary documents, as specified in
Part 4 of ISO/IEC 29500.
.dot Word 97-2003 Template for Word 97-Word 2003 files.

Template
.dotm Word Macro- Template for creating new Word 2021, Word 2019, Word 2016,
Enabled Template Word 2013, Word 2010, and Office Word 2007 files that contain
macros. Users who want to include UI customizations or macros
in the template should use this file format.
.dotx Word Template Template for creating new Word 2021, Word 2019, Word 2016,
Word 2013, Word 2010, and Office Word 2007 files that don't
format
contain macros.
.htm, Web Page A web page that is saved as a folder that contains an .htm file
.html and all supporting files, such as images, sound files, cascading
style sheets, scripts, and more. Good for posting on a site or
editing with Microsoft Office FrontPage or another HTML editor.
.htm, Web Page, Saving in the Web Page, Filtered file format removes Microsoft
.html Filtered Office-specific tags. If users save in filtered HTML and then
reopen the file in an Office application, text and general
appearance are preserved. However, some features might work
differently.
.mht; Single File Web A web page as a single file that includes an .htm file and all
.mhtml Page supporting files, such as images, sound files, cascading style
sheets, scripts, and more.
.odt OpenDocument A file format for saving Word 2021, Word 2019, Word 2016, and
Text Word 2013 files so that they can be opened in document
applications that use the OpenDocument format. Users can also
open documents in the .odt format in Word 2021, Word 2019,
Word 2016, and Word 2013. Formatting might be lost when
users save and open .odt files.
.pdf PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), a PostScript-based electronic

file format developed by Adobe Systems. It preserves document
formatting and enables file sharing.
Files that use the PDF file format can be saved and opened by
using Word 2021, Word 2019, Word 2016, and Word 2013.
Important: PDF files might not have a perfect page-to-page

correspondence with the original. For example, the pages might
break at different locations.
.rtf Rich Text Format RTF controls the representation and formatting of a document,
both on the screen and in print. When they use the .rtf file
format, documents created under different operating systems
and with different software applications can be transferred
between those operating systems and applications.
.txt Plain Text When users save a document as a .txt file, the document loses
all formatting.
.wps Works 6-9 This is the default file format of Microsoft Works, versions 6.0
Document through 9.0.
format
.xml Word 2003 XML The XML format supported in Office Word 2003.
Document
.xml Word XML The XML file format supported in Word 2021, Word 2019, Word
Document 2016, Word 2013, Word 2010, and Office Word 2007 (Open
XML).
.xps XPS Document XML Paper Specification, a file format that preserves document
formatting and enables file sharing. When the XPS file is viewed
online or printed, it keeps exactly the format that users
intended, and the data in the file can't be easily changed.
You can save documents in the XPS Document file format using
Word 2021, Word 2019, Word 2016, or Word 2013. However,
these versions of Word don't support opening XPS files.
File formats that are supported in Excel

The following tables describe the file formats that are supported in Excel.
ﾉ Expand table

format
.csv CSV (Comma Saves a workbook as a comma-delimited text file for use on
delimited) another Windows operating system, and makes sure that tab
characters, line breaks, and other characters are interpreted
correctly. Saves only the active sheet.
.csv CSV (Macintosh) Saves a workbook as a comma-delimited text file for use on the
Macintosh operating system, and makes sure that tab characters,
line breaks, and other characters are interpreted correctly. Saves
only the active sheet.
.csv CSV (MS-DOS) Saves a workbook as a comma-delimited text file for use on the
MS-DOS operating system, and makes sure that tab characters,
.dbf DBF 3, DBF 4 dBase III and IV. Users can open these files formats in Excel 2021,
Excel 2019, Excel 2016, and Excel 2013, but, users can't save an
Excel file to dBase format.
format
.dif DIF (Data Saves only the active sheet.

Interchange
Format)
.htm, Web Page A web page that is saved as a folder that contains an .htm file
.html and all supporting files, such as images, sound files, scripts, and
more.
.mht, Single File Web A web page that is saved as a single file that includes an .htm file
.mhtml Page and all supporting files, such as images, sound files, scripts, and
more.
.ods OpenDocument A file format for saving Excel 2021, Excel 2019, Excel 2016, and
Spreadsheet Excel 2013 files so that they can be opened in spreadsheet
applications that use the OpenDocument Spreadsheet format,
such as Google Docs and OpenOffice.org Calc. Users can also
open spreadsheets in the .ods format in Excel 2021, Excel 2019,
Excel 2016, and Excel 2013. When users save and open .ods files,
they might lose formatting.
.pdf PDF Portable Document Format, a format that preserves document

formatting and enables file sharing. When the PDF format file is
viewed online or printed, it keeps the format that users intended.
Data in the file can't be easily changed. The PDF format is also
useful for documents that will be reproduced by using
commercial printing methods.
.prn Formatted Text Lotus space-delimited format. Saves only the active sheet.
(Space delimited)
.slk SYLK (Symbolic Saves only the active sheet.

Link Format)
.txt Text (Tab Saves a workbook as a tab-delimited text file for use on another
delimited) Windows operating system, and makes sure that tab characters,
.txt Text (Macintosh) Saves a workbook as a tab-delimited text file for use on the
Macintosh operating system, and makes sure that tab characters,
.txt Text (MS-DOS) Saves a workbook as a tab-delimited text file for use on the MS-
DOS operating system, and makes sure that tab characters, line
breaks, and other characters are interpreted correctly. Saves only
the active sheet.
format
.txt Unicode Text Saves a workbook as Unicode text, a character encoding

standard that was developed by the Unicode Consortium. Saves
.xla Excel 97-2003 The Excel 97-2003 add-in, a supplemental program that runs
add-in other code and supports VBA projects.
.xlam Excel add-in The XML-based and macro-enabled add-in format for Excel
2021, Excel 2019, Excel 2016, Excel 2013, and Office Excel 2007.
An add-in is a supplemental program that runs other code.
Supports VBA projects and Excel 4.0 macro sheets (.xlm).
.xls Excel 97-Excel The Excel 97-Excel 2003 Binary file format.
2003 Workbook
.xls Microsoft Excel The Excel 5.0/95 Binary file format.

5.0/95 Workbook
.xlsb Excel Binary The binary file format for Excel 2021, Excel 2019, Excel 2016,
Workbook Excel 2013, and Excel 2010 and Office Excel 2007. This is a fast
load-and-save file format for users who need the fastest way
possible to load a data file. Supports VBA projects, Excel 4.0
macro sheets, and all the new features that are used in Excel. But,
this isn't an XML file format and is therefore not optimal for
accessing and manipulating content without using Excel 2021,
Excel 2019, Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010 or Excel 2007 and
the object model.
.xlsm Excel Macro- The XML-based and macro-enabled file format for Excel 2021,
Enabled Excel 2019, Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010 and Office Excel
Workbook 2007. Stores VBA macro code or Excel 4.0 macro sheets (.xlm).
.xlsx Excel Workbook The default XML-based file format for Excel 2021, Excel 2019,
Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010, and Office Excel 2007. Can't
store VBA macro code or Microsoft Excel 4.0 macro sheets (.xlm).
.xlsx Strict Open XML An ISO strict version of the Excel Workbook file format (.xlsx).
Spreadsheet
.xlt Excel 97 - Excel The Excel 97 - Excel 2003 Binary file format for an Excel template.
2003 Template
.xltm Excel Macro- The macro-enabled file format for an Excel template for Excel
Enabled 2021, Excel 2019, Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010, and Office
Template Excel 2007. Stores VBA macro code or Excel 4.0 macro sheets
(.xlm).
format
.xltx Excel Template The default file format for an Excel template for Excel 2021, Excel
2019, Excel 2016, Excel 2013, Excel 2010, and Office Excel 2007.
Can't store VBA macro code or Excel 4.0 macro sheets (.xlm).
.xlw Excel 4.0 An Excel 4.0 file format that saves only worksheets, chart sheets,
Workbook and macro sheets. Users can open a workbook in this file format
in Excel 2021, Excel 2019, Excel 2016, and Excel 2013. But, users
can't save an Excel file to this file format.
.xml XML Data XML Data format.
.xml XML Spreadsheet XML Spreadsheet 2003 file format.

2003
.xps XPS Document XML Paper Specification, a file format that preserves document
formatting and enables file sharing. When the XPS file is viewed
online or printed, it maintains exactly the format that users
intended, and the data in the file can't be easily changed.
File formats that are supported in PowerPoint

The following tables describe the file formats that are supported in PowerPoint.
ﾉ Expand table

format
.bmp Device A slide that is saved as a graphic for use on web pages.
Independent
Bitmap
.emf Enhanced Windows A slide that is saved as a 32-bit graphic (for use with Microsoft
Metafile Windows 95 and later versions).
.gif GIF Graphics A slide that is saved as a graphic for use on web pages.
Interchange Format
.jpg JPEG File A slide that is saved as a graphic for use on web pages.
Interchange Format
.mp4 MPEG-4 Video A presentation that is saved as a video.
.odp OpenDocument A format that can be opened in presentation applications that

Presentation use the OpenDocument Presentation format, such as Google
Docs and OpenOffice.org Impress. Users can also open
format
presentations in the .odp format in PowerPoint. Some

information might be lost when users save and open .odp files.
.pdf PDF Portable Document Format, a PostScript-based electronic file

format that was developed by Adobe Systems. It preserves
document formatting and enables file sharing.
.png PNG Portable A slide that is saved as a graphic for use on web pages.
Network Graphics
Format
.pot PowerPoint 97- A template for PowerPoint 97 to Office PowerPoint 2003

2003 Template presentations.
.potm PowerPoint Macro- A template for PowerPoint 2019, PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint
Enabled Template 2013, PowerPoint 2010, and Office PowerPoint 2007
presentations that contain macros.
.potx PowerPoint A template for creating new PowerPoint 2019, PowerPoint

Template 2016, PowerPoint 2013, PowerPoint 2010, and Office
PowerPoint 2007 presentations.
.ppa PowerPoint 97- A PowerPoint 97 to Office PowerPoint 2003 add-in.

2003 add-in
.ppam PowerPoint add-in An add-in that stores custom commands, Visual Basic for
Applications (VBA) code, and specialized features.
.pps PowerPoint 97- A presentation that always opens in Slide Show view instead of
2003 show in Normal view.
.ppsm PowerPoint Macro- A slide show that includes macros.

Enabled Show
.ppsx PowerPoint Show A presentation that always opens in Slide Show view instead of
in Normal view.
.ppt PowerPoint 97- The default PowerPoint 97 to Office PowerPoint 2003 format.
2003 Presentation
.pptm PowerPoint Macro- A presentation that contains Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)
Enabled code.
Presentation
.pptx PowerPoint The default PowerPoint 2021, PowerPoint 2019, PowerPoint

Presentation 2016, PowerPoint 2013, PowerPoint 2010, and Office
PowerPoint 2007 XML-based file format.
format
.pptx PowerPoint Picture A PowerPoint 2021, PowerPoint 2019, PowerPoint 2016,

Presentation PowerPoint 2013, PowerPoint 2010 or PowerPoint 2007
presentation where each slide is converted into a picture.
Saving a file as a PowerPoint Picture presentation reduces the
file size, but some information is lost.
.pptx Strict Open XML An ISO strict version of the PowerPoint Presentation file format
Presentation (.pptx).
.rtf Outline/RTF A presentation outline that is saved as a text-only document

that provides smaller file sizes and the ability to share macro-
free files with other users who might not have the same
version of PowerPoint or the operating system. Any text in the
notes pane isn't saved with this file format.
.thmx Office Theme A style sheet that includes definitions of a color theme, font
theme, and effect theme.
.tif TIFF Tag Image File A slide that is saved as a graphic for use on web pages.
Format
.wmf Windows Metafile A slide that is saved as a 16-bit graphic (for use with Microsoft
Windows 3.x and later versions).
.wmv Windows Media A presentation that is saved as a video. PowerPoint 2019,

Video PowerPoint 2016, and PowerPoint 2013 presentations can be
saved at High Quality (1024 x 768, 30 frames per second);
Medium Quality (640 x 480, 24 frames per sec); and Low
Quality (320 X 240, 15 frames per second).
.xml PowerPoint XML The XML format that is supported in PowerPoint 2019,
Presentation PowerPoint 2016, PowerPoint 2013, PowerPoint 2010, and
Office PowerPoint 2007.
.xps XPS Document XML Paper Specification (XPS), an electronic paper format for
exchanging documents in their final form.
Unsupported file formats in Office

Office applications don't support the file formats described in the following table.
ﾉ Expand table
Application Unsupported file format
Excel - Excel Chart (Excel 2.0, 3.0, and 2.x file formats) (.xlc)
- Lotus 1-2-3 file formats (all versions) (.wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wks)
- Microsoft Works (all versions) (.wks)
- DBASE II file format (.dbf)
- Quattro Pro for MS-DOS file format (.wq1)
- Quattro Pro 5.0 and 7.0 for Windows (.wb1, .wb3)
PowerPoint - Opening or saving to PowerPoint 95 (or earlier) file formats

- Pack and Go Wizard (.ppz) files.
- Web Page (.htm, .html) files
More file format information

This section provides more file formats and whether they're supported in the
applications in Office.
Microsoft Office Clipboard file formats

Users can paste data from the Office Clipboard into Word, Excel, and PowerPoint if the
Office Clipboard data is in one of the formats shown in the following table.
ﾉ Expand table
File format Extension Description
Bitmap .bmp Pictures stored in Bitmap format (BMP).
CSV (Comma- .csv Comma-separated values format.

delimited)
DIF .dif Data Interchange Format.
Embedded object .gif, .jpg, .doc, Excel objects, Excel 2013 objects, objects from correctly
.xls, or .bmp registered programs that support OLE 2.0 (OwnerLink), and
Picture or another presentation format.
Excel file formats .xls Binary file formats for Excel versions 5.0/95, Excel 97-2003,
Excel 2013, Excel 2016, and Excel 2019.
Formatted text .rtf Rich Text Format (RTF). Only from Excel.
(Space-delimited)
HTML .htm, .html Hypertext Markup Language.
Note: When users copy text from another program, Excel

File format Extension Description
pastes the text in HTML format, regardless of the format of

the original text.
Linked object .gif, .jpg, .doc, OwnerLink, ObjectLink, Link, Picture, or other format.
.xls, or .bmp
Office drawing .emf Office drawing object format or Picture (Windows

object enhanced metafile format, EMF).
Picture .wmf or .emf Pictures in Windows Metafile Format (WMF) or Windows

Enhanced Metafile Format (EMF).
Note: If users copy a Windows metafile picture from

another program, Excel pastes the picture as an enhanced
metafile.
Single File Web .mht, .mhtml This file format integrates inline graphics, applets, linked
Page documents, and other supporting items referenced in the
document.
SYLK .slk Symbolic Link Format.
Text (tab- .txt Tab-separated text format.

delimited)
Text .txt Display Text, OEM Text.
Opening or viewing unsupported file formats

If the file format that users want to use isn't supported, they can try the following
methods to open the file.
Search the internet for a company that makes file format converters for file formats
that aren't supported in the application.
Save to a file format that another program supports. For example, users might
want to import their Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file into another program that
doesn't support the application's native file format. However, the other program
might support importing another supported file format, such as a text file format.
In this case, users can save their work in text file format, and then from the other
program, import the text file.
Related articles
XML file name extension reference for Office
Feedback

XML file name extension reference for
Office
Article • 02/25/2023
XML file formats and their extensions are listed in the following tables for Word, Excel,
PowerPoint, and Visio.
XML file types for Word

The following table describes the file type, extension, and description for Word XML file
formats.
XML file types for Word
Word file Extension Description

type
Word .docx The default Word file format. Can't store VBA macro code.
Document
Strict .docx Conforms to the Strict profile of the Open XML standard (ISO/IEC
Open 29500). This profile of Open XML doesn't allow a set of features that
XML were designed specifically for backward-compatibility with existing
document binary documents, as specified in Part 4 of ISO/IEC 29500.
Word .docm Uses the same basic XML format as the Word document format, but can
Macro- store VBA macro code. This file type is created when VBA macro code is
Enabled present in the file.
Document
Word .dotx The default format for a Word template. Created when document styles
Template and formatting are saved. Can't store VBA macro code.
Word .dotm Stores macro code for use with other Word documents. Does not always
Macro- contain macro code, but is configured to support the storage of macro
Enabled code. Word documents created from a macro-enabled template do not
Template inherit the VBAProject part of the template. By default, documents are
saved as .docx files even when they are created from a Word macro-
enabled template.
XML file types for Excel

The following table describes the file type, extension, and description for Excel XML file
formats.
XML file types for Excel
Excel file Extension Description

type
Excel .xlsx The default Excel file format. Can't store VBA macro code or Microsoft
Workbook Excel 4.0 macro sheets (.xlm files in Excel 4.0).
Strict Open .xlsx An ISO strict version of the Excel Workbook file format (.xlsx).
XML
Spreadsheet
Excel .xlsm Uses the same basic XML format as the Excel Workbook, but can store
Macro- VBA macro code. Users who save an Excel workbook that has VBA
Enabled code or Excel 4.0 macro sheets (.xlm files in Excel 4.0) are prompted to
Workbook use this file format.
Excel .xltx The default file format for an Excel template. Can't store VBA macro
Template code or Excel 4.0 macro sheets (.xlm files in Excel 4.0).
Excel .xltm Can contain a VBAProject part or Excel 4.0 macro sheets (.xlm files in
Macro- Excel 4.0). Workbooks created from this template inherit the
Enabled VBAProject part or Excel 4.0 macro sheets that exist in the template.
Template
Excel Add- .xlam A supplemental program that runs additional code. Excel add-ins use
In the Open XML file format to store data, and they support using VBA
projects and Excel 4.0 macro sheets.
XML file types for PowerPoint

The following table describes the file type, extension, and description for PowerPoint
XML file formats.
XML file types for PowerPoint
PowerPoint Extension Description

file type
PowerPoint .pptx The default PowerPoint XML format. Can't contain a VBAProject part
Presentation (the part that stores VBA macro code) or Action settings.
Strict Open .pptx An ISO strict version of the PowerPoint Presentation file format
XML (.pptx).
Presentation
PowerPoint Extension Description
file type
PowerPoint .pptm The same basic XML format as the PowerPoint XML presentation
Macro- format, but can store VBA macro code. Users who save a PowerPoint
Enabled XML presentation file that contains VBA macro code are prompted to
Presentation use this file type.
PowerPoint .potx An XML-based PowerPoint template. Created when a presentation

Template does not have a VBAProject part and does not use Action settings.
PowerPoint .potm Users who save a PowerPoint XML template that contains VBA macro
Macro- code are prompted to use this file type. Presentations created from
Enabled this template do not inherit the VBAProject part or Action settings.
Template
PowerPoint .ppam PowerPoint presentation designed to be run as a supplemental

Add-In program. All PowerPoint add-ins are macro-enabled.
PowerPoint .ppsx An XML-based PowerPoint auto-running slide show. Can't contain a

Show VBAProject part.
PowerPoint .ppsm An XML-based PowerPoint slide show file that contains a VBAProject
Macro- part. Created when the auto-running slide show includes VBA macro
Enabled code.
Show
XML file types for Visio

Visio uses the XML file format package that is defined by the Open Packaging
Conventions (ISO/IEC 29500-2:2008) standard. The XML content is based on the existing
Visio XML Drawing (VDX) format.
The following table describes the file type, extension, and description for Visio XML file
formats.
XML file types for Visio
Visio file Extension Description

type
Visio .vsdx The default Visio file format. Can't store VBA macro code.
Drawing
Visio .vsdm Uses the same basic XML format as the Visio drawing format (.vsdx), but
Macro- can store VBA macro code. This file type must be used when VBA macro
Enabled code is present in the file.
Drawing
Visio file Extension Description
type
Visio .vssx The default format for a Visio stencil. Can't store VBA macro code.
Stencil
Visio .vssm Uses the same basic XML format as the Visio Stencil (.vssx) format, but
Macro- can store VBA macro code. Does not always contain macro code, but is
Enabled configured to support the storage of macro code.
Stencil
Visio .vstx The default format for a Visio template. Can't store VBA macro code.
Template
Visio .vstm Uses the same basic XML format as the Visio Template (.vstx) format, but
Macro- can store VBA macro code. Does not always contain macro code, but is
Enabled configured to support the storage of macro code. Visio Drawings that are
Template created from this template inherit the VBAProject part that exists in the
template. However, by default, drawings are saved as .vsdx files even
when they are created from a Visio macro-enabled template and will
drop the VBAProject part.
Related topics
File format reference for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

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Assess Office compatibility

Applies to: Office 2019, Office 2016

Office Telemetry Dashboard is no longer supported in Microsoft 365 Apps for

What is Office Telemetry Dashboard?

Office Telemetry Dashboard works as follows: When an Office document or solution is

Office Telemetry Dashboard is an on-premises tool that collects inventory,

The Office compatibility process

Phases of the Office compatibility process

Phase 1: Discover which Office documents and

Choose which Office client computers to monitor

Identify privacy concerns with business group

Decide how you want to categorize clients that are shown

Gain insights from data in Office Telemetry Dashboard

Work with business groups to decide what Office

Classifying Office documents and solutions to test

Type of documents and solutions Testing needed

Documents and solutions that IT is Proactive testing

Documents and solutions that IT fix if Reactive testing

Documents and solutions that nobody Don't test

Phase 3: Validate that Office files and solutions

Identify users for user acceptance testing

Set up an environment for user acceptance testing

We recommend that you use side-by-side installations of Office as a temporary

Fix issues in high priority Office documents and solutions

Phase 4: Manage the transition to the new

These sections provide more guidance about the Manage phase.

Manage Office add-ins by using Office Telemetry

User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Office application

User Configuration\Policies\Administrative Templates\Office application

Phase out earlier versions of Office

Manage compatibility mode in Office

Prepare help desk and users for change

Provide product feedback

Applies to: Office 2019, Office 2016

Office Telemetry Dashboard is no longer supported in Microsoft 365 Apps for

Area More information

You'll need to update the Office Telemetry Dashboard components if you're

To manage the database, download the Telemetry Dashboard Administration Tool

- File format reference for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint

Office Telemetry Dashboard, agent, and other components

- Office Telemetry Dashboard worksheets

Office Telemetry Log

- Types of Office files and solutions tracked in Office Telemetry Log

Compatibility issues in Office Telemetry Log

- Set up Office Telemetry Dashboard on a single computer This script automates

- Telemetry Dashboard Administration Tool download and wiki

Videos Watch videos that are related to Office compatibility:

- Quick tips for Office Telemetry Dashboard navigation

Applies to: Office 2019, Office 2016

Office Telemetry Dashboard is no longer supported in Microsoft 365 Apps for

Introducing Office Telemetry Dashboard

Office Telemetry Dashboard is an on-premises tool that collects inventory,

Before you begin planning an Office Telemetry

Agents upload data every 8 hours, which is the default setting.

Each user has a single computer that runs an agent.

Office Telemetry Dashboard components

Office Telemetry Dashboard:

- Shows IT Pros a combined view of inventory, usage, and health data

Office Telemetry Log:

Office Telemetry Log:

Office Telemetry Agent:

- Reports usage and inventory data for all Office clients.