I have Office Professional Plus 2010 installed in a Windows 7 VM. Office now claims to no longer be activated and required re-activation. This might have coincided with the move to my new system, but I’m not sure since I don’t often use Windows and use Office even less.
I got Office years ago from my university’s MSDN program, and I still have the Licence Key which I was told would always remain valid. If I enter the Licence Key on the activation page of Office, it seems to validate it then says to exit/restart Office for it to take effect, but upon restarting still asks for activation by internet or telephone.
Activation by internet fails: “This product cannot be activated because the product key is not valid.”
Telephone activation: It says telephone activation is no longer supported for your product. After digging through the help documentation, I found a valid toll free number for my country, got an automated activation ‘agent’ which seemed to accept the Installation ID, then said my product isn’t valid and hung up…
I contacted MS by chat, and they did note that it’s a perpetual license MSDN volume key… which is now dead.
They said they cannot re-issue a license, especially for legacy products like Office 2010. Their only solution was to buy a new key.
I was given the contact info for Volume Licensing Service Center support, which I’ll contact when they’re open during weekday in case they have another solution.
Probably a disagreeable opinion here, but it is time to move on.
Get a 365 sub, run office on any device you own (up to 5 i think including tablets, PCs, etc.), or via a browser, etc…
It’s like 9 dollars a month, which at the cost office 2010 would have originally been, something like 3-5 years worth of perpetual license with a lot more benefits.
Fair enough i haven’t looked into the cost too much, i just have a 365 sub through work and had a personal one before that.
I’ll also point out that Office 2010 is officially EOL and i don’t think it is getting security updates any more (i think it’s 7 years for office?). Definitely close to that point in any case.
edit:
scratch that, its 10 years for office. so you’ve got til 2020 for patches. Still…
I got the Office 2010 license for free, and I use it so infrequently that paying any amount would feel like a waste.
That MSDN program was great. The tech guy for my department said it cost them $500 for the whole department for unlimited keys to what seemed like the entire MS library. I got a pile of free Windows 7 Pro licenses, and I thought about getting Visual Studio but I just had no use for it.
You’re missing the fine print on the MSDN program: it’s for lab/development/test use only.
I had a technet sub as well. If you’re running a whole department in a commercial setting on an MSDN sub, you’re violating the license… that’s not what the license is for. Sure, it might work, but just because something doesn’t throw a licensing error it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s legit.
Part of the reason MS killed the MSDN/technet program is because of people doing exactly this (yeah, i did it too).
And yeah, if you use it so infrequently, maybe consider something else?
I don’t think I ever saw the fine print. I would just ask the tech at my university department and he would issue keys… for any items that didn’t automatically issue keys from the MSDN webstore. I still have the automated emails with keys from MSDNAA E-Academy License Management System (ELMS).
Aren’t those semi-legit with a risk of getting banned?
What alternatives work best?
The most I’ve used is LibreOffice, but there’s always the worry about how things look in MS Office. I’ve had occasional bad surprises with formatting and fonts.
There used to be the free MS Office viewers (Word, etc), but it seems that’s discontinued.
I just came across the cross-platform FreeOffice. Any comments?
MSDN still exists but there are many T&C’s and old accounts will expire. MS also have rebranded and changed the types of subscriptions available several times. If an old subscription has expired then the keys usually stop working.
One easy way to have Word compatibility is to sign up for a free MS live account and use the free-to-use cloud versions. There are some features missing but it tends not to cause formatting issues like libreoffice can when working with per-existing word docs.
Good points. I do use Google Docs and (rarely) MS Office live, but I don’t always want them having copies of my documents for all time. Local-only can give a certain peace of mind and a degree of privacy.
Side note about privacy
When chatting with MS support, I was asked to provide my name, email address, and phone number “for documentation purposes”. I declined and they continued with support anyways.
In the process, they created a secure file upload link for me to send my product key for them to check. I stupidly clicked that linked while still being logged in to Hotmail/Outlook/Live in the same browser, and the page of that link automatically recognized my name/account.
After ending the chat, I got an email confirming my chat with support… without ever having explicitly given any personal info.
LibreOffice, of course. The concern comes when sharing documents with others and worrying about consistency.
I once sent in a job application made in LibreOffice, but exported to PDF with the idea that it would be universal. I thought I even included the option to embed fonts etc. Well, the recipient was incredibly kind to point out that they couldn’t read it; it was just black squares / special characters. I then checked in MS Word and confirmed what they mentioned.
Since then I’ve been a bit paranoid about formatting, and I also avoid any special fonts. Checking with MS Office or something known to be totally compatible seems pretty important to avoid embarrassing problems.
Even MS Office viewer would be good enough for that. Any idea on how consistent FreeOffice is with MS Office?
Since the application has been previously activated with the official key, it started giving such an error - in this case, try the following manipulations. Check if the date, time, and time zone are set correctly on your PC.
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