Using the 64-bit version of Office lets you deliver a 64-bit version of those solutions as well as a 32-bit version. You’re developing in-house Office solutions like add-ins or document-level customization. You’re working with files over 2 GB in Project, especially if the project has many sub-projects.
The 64-bit version of Office may be better suited to handle these complex slide decks. You’re working with extremely large pictures, videos, or animations in PowerPoint. See Excel specifications and limits, Data Model specification and limits, and Memory usage in the 32-bit edition of Excel. The 64-bit version of Office may perform better in these cases. You’re working with large data sets, like enterprise-scale Excel workbooks with complex calculations, many pivot tables, data connections to external databases, Power Pivot, 3D Map, Power View, or Get & Transform. Therefore, if your scenarios include large files and/or working with large data sets and your computer is running 64-bit version of Windows, 64-bit is the right choice when: Also, 64-bit applications can access more memory than 32-bit applications (up to 18.4 million Petabytes).
Reasons to choose the 64-bit versionĬomputers running 64-bit versions of Windows generally have more resources such as processing power and memory, than their 32-bit predecessors. If you're still not sure which version, 32-bit or 64-bit is a better choice for you, see the section below. See “Office (64-bit or 32-bit) couldn’t be installed” error.
The same is true if you installed the 32-bit version, but want to install the 64-bit version. You can search for an alternative solution.Important: If you install the 64-bit version, but want the 32-bit version instead, you must first uninstall the 64-bit version before installing the 32-bit version. You can contact the vendor for an updated version, If you have the source code, you can generate a 64-bit version yourself, If you need to go with the 64-bit version because of the memory limitations you have the following options:
In addition, if you have in-house solution developers, we recommend that those developers have access to the 64-bit edition of Office 2010 so that they can test and update your in-house solutions on the 64-bit edition of Office 2010. If some users in your organization are Excel expert users who work with Excel spreadsheets that are larger than 2 gigabytes (GB), they can install the 64-bit edition of Office 2010. If users in your organization depend on existing extensions to Office, such as ActiveX controls, third-party add-ins, in-house solutions built on previous versions of Office, or 32-bit versions of programs that interface directly with Office, we recommend that you install 32-bit Office 2010 (the default installation) on computers that are running both 32-bit and 64-bit supported Windows operating systems. The recommendations for which edition of Office 2010 to install are as follows: Microsoft recommends to use the 32-bit version of Office unless you run into the memory limitations of a 32-bit process which is only likely to happen if you need to deal with extremely large spreadsheets: 32-bit add-ins are not supported on 64-bit.