Microsoft office installation help?

[Gill]

The wife purchased this ages ago and it has sat and never been installed ,i tryed to do it tonight but it is asking for a product key number which i cant find i only have the disc ,I called microsoft and they said they could help do it but there would be a small fee £189 :yikes::yikes:.WHY ON EARTH? Can anybody help ?

 

[Shewie]

Are there no stickers on the disc box Gill? Which version of Office is it?

 

[Gill]

She cant find the box she took it out it ages ago Richit is office professional plus 2010.

 

[Gill]

How can they justify £189???

 

[Adze]

£189 is Microsoft's standard price for Office Home and Business... so I suspect their 'help' comprises selling you a new licence/product code. If it really does come to buying a new licence, the price on ebuyer.com is a bit less at £156

Sorry to inform you Gill that without the product code the install disk you have is just a pretty coaster, or highly decorated miniature frisbee. I'd be searching for that box pretty hard if it were me as the product code is the important bit, you can actually download the installer from Microsoft's website.

There are no legal ways to help you install it without the product code.

 

[Gill]

Ok buddy ,she thinks it only cost around £20 to start with?

 

[Shewie]

I'm afraid Adam is right Gill, without the box you're pretty much up poop creek without a paddle

 

[gsfgaz]

you've been ripped rite off bud .....

 

[Adze]

£20 for genuine office? Did you get it through work or something? If so, you could get the volume licence code from work again, provided they've got a record of your purchase - definitely worth an ask if work hasn't changed.

Failing that - why not try Libreoffice? http://www.libreoffice.org

It's free to download and install for any purpose and looks just like MS Office before they ruined it with that flippin' ribbon thing.

 

[Gill]

Yes i just asked the better half works in a college so got it discounted .

 

[PeterH]

From what you say it was probably a digital licence (an email) and bought or borrowed the media. If last year the chances are it was on the Ultimate Steal (office 2007 ultimate but they also did 2010 for a while) or more recently on the home use program. Both use digitalriver to handle the sales and fullfilment so search work email for that and either find the product key or the login details to retrieve. Alternatively if employer is signed up for home use it is around a tenner to get a new key with an ac.uk email.

Good luck

 

[Gill]

Thank you buddy she can check tomorrow.

 

[Kernowek Scouser]

Something kind of similar happened to me. I paid A LOT of money for an all singing, all dancing version of the office package, installed it on my laptop, hardly used most of the applications, other Outlook, Word & Excel for six months, then my laptop got half inched. When I got a replacement sorted out and tried to re-install the Office package, I could not find the product key for love nor money.

Microsoft were happy to help, if I was happy to pay £29.99 for half an hours telephone assistance, plus another £49.99 for a new product key.

I was not happy and I declined their offer to help. I spoke to Trading Standards and they told me I was buggered.

I was somewhat distraught.

Then a friend pointed me in the direction of Open Office, a free package of office alike applications (not unlike the Libre Office mentioned above) and the email app Mozilla Thunderbird.

I've been using these two free downloads for the best part of three years now and I have no complaints with them bar one, why didn't my friend mention them before I spent £400+ on F-ing Mircosoft Office?!?

So unless you can get a volume licence key from work, my advice is BUGGER MICROSOFT and go for a free office suite (plus Thunderbird if you need an email app).

Good Luck

 

[Adze]

Then a friend pointed me in the direction of Open Office, a free package of office alike applications (not unlike the Libre Office mentioned above) and the email app Mozilla Thunderbird.

Only problem with OpenOffice (OO) is it's had precious little development since Oracle foisted it on the Apache Foundation after realising is wasn't likely to be the money-spinner it look like it might have been. LibreOffice (LO) is a fork of the OO project with many of the original devs and is an ongoing concern whereas OO appears to have stalled somewhat.

LO certainly does a better job of importing certain types of MS documents - notably MS Works (.wps) and MS XMLDoc (.docx) than OO does.

Thunderbird, on the otherhand, is a stonking mail client compared with Outlook. Outlook is a perfect MS Exchange client - but leaves a bit to be desired (imho) as a mail client and the Google Calendar tab add-in for it is extremely good, perfect for anyone with an Android phone.

Oh yeah... OO LO and Thunderbird all work on Linux desktops really simply - whereas MSOffice and Outlook take a huge amount of mucking about, by comparison.

 

[Old Bones]

You can see MS's point of view with regard to the product key. Once apon a time, you could copy Office onto a load of floppies and have a working copy without paying a penny. Thats why there is a product key, so that you know (and they know) its the real deal (its not unknown for some retailers to sell a ripped off copy as the real thing). If it cost £20, then I'd generally wonder where it came from.

You can use Libre Office, Open Office, or a load of other similar free packages, but be warned that you kind of get what you pay for. I still use Open Office on my desktop, but its not quite as easy to use as MS Office, and is a lot slower on an older machine (version 3 is a memory hog). Its certainly fine for the occassional letter, spreadsheet, etc, but I wouldn't want to use it all day for work. On the other hand, the basic Office Excel thats comes with Windows 7 doesn't freeze panes, while Open Office does...

Thunderbird is really good, and I used it for years (better than Outlook). The only reason I don't bother now is that my ISP has all my emails online, so there is little need for a seperate programme to read emails.

Firstly, find the product key (in fact always a) keep the packaging and b) write the keys down on everything), and if you can't, then go for the freebies. Or buy another copy of MS Office if you can't do without it. Good luck.

 

[sandbender]

The wife purchased this ages ago and it has sat and never been installed ,i tryed to do it tonight but it is asking for a product key number which i cant find i only have the disc ,I called microsoft and they said they could help do it but there would be a small fee £189 :yikes::yikes:.WHY ON EARTH? Can anybody help ?

What is it you need to do? Why do you need a copy of Office on your PC now and not back then?

If all you need is to write Word documents or play around with Excel sheets then the two already mentioned options 'Libre Office' and 'Open Office' will do as much as most folks would need.

Or easier still, use Google Docs instead. Nothing to install and no discs, codes or product keys to lose.

 

[chris_irwin]

unfortunately, when you purchase the software, what you're actually buying is the license. If you lose the product key, as far as they are concerned, you have lost the product and they can't help.

 

[Shewie]

Is there such a thing as online registration for a product, say Gill buys Office, registers his license with Microsoft under his own account, if he loses his PC then can't Microsoft just reissue him another license key?

I see all these registration cards in stuff these days but just chuck them in the bin usually

 

[Adze]

Is there such a thing as online registration for a product, say Gill buys Office, registers his license with Microsoft under his own account, if he loses his PC then can't Microsoft just reissue him another license key?

It's a cracking idea... but explain again how that's in their best interests when they can sell him a brand spanking new licence for £189 instead?

 

[Shewie]

It's a cracking idea... but explain again how that's in their best interests when they can sell him a brand spanking new licence for £189 instead?

True true

You don't get to be the second richest bloke on the planet by being nice