Office 2010 – change the Product Key

by Office Watch

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Sometimes you’ll want to change the Product Key used on your installation of Office 2010.

The Product Key is the 25 letter/number string that is supplied with your purchase of Microsoft Office. It is vital to any purchase of Office software and should be kept safe.

Go to the Windows Control Panel, Programs and Features (“Add or Remove Programs” in some versions of Windows), select Office 2010 in the list of programs and choose ‘Change’.

This will start the setup program and show an ‘Enter a Product Key’ option

Office 2010 - Change or Enter a Product Key

From there, you can change the Product Key using the same steps as during the original installation.

Office 2010 - Enter Product Key

‘Activation’ is the process of checking the Product Key and computer details with Microsoft to ensure that the software is properly licensed. Expert Office users often choose to UNcheck the ‘Attempt to automatically activate my product online’ preferring to activate the software later when they are sure the hardware and software are working properly.

Activation can be done later from the File | Help menu in any Office 2010 application.

At the next step you can either ‘Continue’ which keeps your Office setup or ‘Customize’ which gives you another chance to change the programs and extras installed.

Office 2010 - setup - continue or customize

Even if you make no setup changes and only change the Product Key, it may take a few minutes for the configuration settings to be updated.

Office 2010 setup - setup completed

Office 2010 applications won’t reflect the changes until you close and restart them.

Article posted: Thursday, 20 May 2010

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