Friday 23 November 2018

Temporary Access to a De-Activated Office 2010

This option will return your Office to a 28-day trial and give the user a 'breathing-space' to transfer data, find a legal key or an alternative to Office. It is not a long-term solution.

a) In the Search box (near the start button) type Folder Options and click on the top result of the search. Once the Folder Options box appears, click on the View tab. About halfway down the list you will see the option to 'Show hidden files, folders and drives' click a bullet in that option, then Apply and Ok

b) Next, navigate to:-

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoftshared\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform

In that folder, you should see a file called:  OSPPREARM

c) Double click on OSPPREARM and you will see a small black screen flash up, then disappear.

d) Close all screens.

e) Office will now return to a 28-day trial. However, the activation screen will still appear when you open Word, Outlook, etc. Simply close that screen by clicking on the X at top right. You can now continue to use your chosen application as normal.

f) Most people will want to access Outlook to recover emails, etc. Is there an alternative to Outlook? Yes, there is. It's called Thunderbird, it's developed by Mozilla and, best of all, it's FREE.

NOTE: Sorry, but we cannot answer any questions on this subject. If in difficulty, please re-read the steps carefully.

Microsoft Office 2010 De-Activates

First of all, I must stress that this article refers to Microsoft Office 2010 with a LEGAL license or key ONLY.

We have recently been getting reports of legal versions of Microsoft Office 2010 suddenly de-activating after having worked for long periods of time. Sometimes after a Windows Update. Do you get these screens after trying to re-activate over the internet:-




Sadly, the news is not particularly good. For the following reasons:-

1) You will not be able to use customer telephone support to report the fault as it has been withdrawn by Microsoft.

2) Microsoft have tightened up security on this particular product. This means that a key designed for ONE computer cannot be used for multiple pc's. Attempts to do so can de-activate Office 2010 on all installations!
So, sharing a single-use key with family and friends can lead to all installations being deactivated by Microsoft.

3) Once the key has been de-activated by Microsoft, you will mot likely never be able to use that particular key again.

PART RESOLUTIONS

1) You could try buying a new fresh key over the internet (Ebay, etc) but these are very scarce, often do not work and are quite expensive. As far as we know, Microsoft do not sell fresh keys for this version of Office, as they would much rather you bought one of their current products.

2) If you are not using Outlook, then there are FREE alternative office versions such as LibreOffice, Apache OpenOffice, WPS Office, etc.

3) A temporary solution to enable you access to Outlook emails and Data in particular can be found in our next blog - 'Temporary Access to a De-Activated Office 2010'