We recently attended a trouble call, where the customer could not run a new installation of Microsoft Office 365 successfully.
She had recently uninstalled an older business version of Office, called “Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016”, that had been retired as the company had gone out of business. However, when she tried to run Microsoft Outlook 365, it would only open to the Microsoft Activation Wizard for the retired verson of Office, asking for the new valid registration key. She no longer had a valid key and now wanted to move to Office 365.
For failed uninstallations of Microsoft Office, there is a “fix me” tool which should remove all traces of previous versions. However this had failed to remove the old registration information and now the customer was caught in a vicious circle.
Luckily there is an “under the bonnet” fix for this situation which involves running a script in a special zone of Windows called the “Command Prompt”.
Running this prompt, allowed us to remove the expired registration information and allow Office 365 to run as normal. One must firstly run a script to identify the 5 digit key of the expired version of Office. Finally, a second script is run to unregister that old version of Office.
I have listed the scripts belowing depending on your verion of Office but I want to stress that this is not for the faint of heart. If you have any doubt about how to run these scripts, then please leave it to a professional.
Here are scripts:
Open a command prompt as Administrator
In the command prompt, type the following:
Office 2016 (32-bit) on a 32-bit version of Windows
cscript “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16\OSPP.VBS” /dstatus
Office 2016 (32-bit) on a 64-bit version of Windows
cscript “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16\OSPP.VBS” /dstatus
Office 2016 (64-bit) on a 64-bit version of Windows
cscript “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16\OSPP.VBS” /dstatus
You should now get a screen with some license details such as the license name, type and the last 5 characters of the Product Key.
4. You can use the last 5 characters of the Product Key to remove it using command:
Office 2016 (32-bit) on a 32-bit version of Windows
cscript “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16\OSPP.VBS” /unpkey:<LAST 5 CHARACTERS>
Office 2016 (32-bit) on a 64-bit version of Windows
cscript “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16\OSPP.VBS” /unpkey:<LAST 5 CHARACTERS>
Office 2016 (64-bit) on a 64-bit version of Windows
cscript “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16\OSPP.VBS” /unpkey:<LAST 5 CHARACTERS>
