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Mac Office 2011

L

Louisville Law

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 15, 2011
3
0
I bought a MacBook Pro in February, along with Office for Mac 2011.

I believe Office was pre-installed, and all I did was enter the Activation Key.

I can't find the installation media or the box it came in.

My hard drive failed a day or so ago, and Apple replaced it.

I restored from Time Machine.

It wants me to enter the Activation Key to authorize my Office.

I spent an hour at the Apple Store, to no avail. I called the Apple tech support line - no dice. Was told to call Microsoft.

Called Microsoft and got an almost entirely unhelpful fellow from India who after a half hour of not understanding the problem told me I needed to call MS Replacement line.

Called MS Replacement and got told that they could sell me another copy of Office.

Is there no way to restore the activated Office from the Time Machine backup?
 
Sad to say, you just have to keep at it with MS. I did two clean Lion installs on fresh disks and in both cases the Office 2011 (re)activation failed. The online reactivation failed, and the automated telephone reactivation failed as well. Most ungraciously, too.

The first time I spent about an hour on the phone, with three or four different MS units, and finally got satisfaction.

The second time I just kept hitting 0 on the phone keypad and saying "help" in answer to every voice prompt.

Finally I got a competent woman (in fact the first human being to come on the line) who straightened it out without much fuss.

In the first case, I got a new key code. In the second case, I got an entirely new installation code (the very long series of numbers).

In both cases I did have physical possession of the installation media and the original code. You don't, so it's going to be more difficult, but the installation code should come up when your activation fails and you get the window telling you to call or try online. Put it any old set of alphanumeric characters, 5 at a time, into those 5 windows. Of course it's going to fail, but the failure should bring up that screen showing your installation code. Write it down, or paste it into textedit, or keep it on the screen while you're calling.

All I can say is keep trying by phone. When I said "New disk, clean install of Lion, restored from Time Machine, Office won't activate," the woman didn't ask for any other explanation. It must be common.
 
I entered bogus activation code

It gave me "The product key is not valid. Make sure that you entered the correct key. If the key doesn't work, contact Microsoft Service and Support".
 
Yes, that's what it should have given you, because you failed (deliberately).

I can't recreate it here, but what you should try next is the online link contained in that message. Isn't there something like that sends you to a MS page to try again?

You should end up at a screen where you're supposed to type in that enormous installation code, which should appear on your screen in a small font.

Don't bother doing that, but keep that number.

I'm sorry that I can't be more specific. That number is going to pop up somewhere for you. The thing is that if you don't have either the key code or the installation number, MS isn't going to help you. You don't have the code, so you need that damn installation number.

I have a spare MBP here and if you can't get to that number, I can try an installation on that MBP, which will fail to activate, and I can take careful note of the steps that got me to that installation code.

Here's a series of steps:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2391941

You need to make your way (on your Mac) to the screen "To activate by phone, follow these steps." Your installation ID should show.

It's probably not worth using telephone support to get to the (automated) place where you give that number. For me, it failed abruptly every time. So you want to try to somehow get a human being on the line.

There may well be other ways (probably all illegal). What I'm saying is that for me, it didn't matter that I had the correct product key, and it didn't matter that I had a installation ID. These were both rejected, and only the human being could fix it.
 
Activation

Apparently they've changed things since you did it.

There is only one link in the "Wrong Code" message, and that goes to file:///Applications/Microsoft%20Office%202011/Read%20Me.html, which does not have any numbers. Great. Oh, well - thanks for your help! (And I've given up on trying to get telephone support.)
 
Hmmm. It was only last week that I did it.

Sorry not to have been more help.

There's a Windows application that reveals the product key for any given installation. Maybe there's something similar for the Mac world.
 
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