Hi all,

If this is in the wrong place I appologise.

I wonder if anyone can help me. I have MS Office 2000 pro on my old desktop, (a product that set me back £450 when I bought it new) and I wanted to install it on a new laptop, but in either the move from Scotland to France, or France to here I've lost my disc's. So does any computer guru out there know a work around, or, have a set of office disc's that will run on windows and XP, as I guess that to file share they will have to be runing the same software. I'm not overly impressed with myself for losing it, and stumping up another large wad of cash is making it worse.

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Do you still have the license key? If so borrow somebody elses install disk and use your key, all perfectly legit.

Do you still have your license key?

Not that I'm aware of, can I get it off the computer itself?

It was probably with the disk. It's the long string of numbers and letters you put in when installing the software.

If the software is still on your old desktop it is technically possibly to get the key from the current installation. Just use google to lookup how to retrieve MS office 2000 product key. Some site out there will probably have instructions on how to get it back.

If you get that far, You would still need the CD's to install the software on the laptop. What you need to make sure is that once you have installed the laptop and got it working that you remove the software from the desktop machine as you are probably only licensed to use it on one machine.

If you do not want to lay out a whole lot of money again, you could give OpenOffice a try. Costs nothing but the download and install, it works nicely on Windows as well as Mac and Linux. Indeed if you buy the latest Office you won't recognise it from previous versions. So my advice would be to get Open Office, it is compatible with up to Office 2003 that I know of with menus and the way it works in general.

MS Office Home and Student 2007 - 150 francs or so.

Or take OpenOffice. Or StarOffice.

I recently needed my MS key numbers handy before I reformatted my laptop.

I used the free "Magical Jellybean keyfinder" to obtain the numbers to all my MS software.

A quote from the website "The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is a freeware open source utility that retrieves your Product Key (cd key) used to install Windows from your registry. It allows you to print or save your keys for safekeeping. It works on Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003, Server 2008, Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 family of products. It also has a community-updated configuration file that retrieves product keys for many other applications. Another feature is the ability to retrieve product keys from unbootable Windows installations."

The website is here.

Hope this helps

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what Lob said: go to openoffice.org, its free, open source and almost certainly compatible with your files. you should find it very easy to use if you like MS office.

for a less traditional approach, docs.google.com is free, online service that will do most (if not all) of what you need, but there is a bit of a learning curve (imho).

I'd like to add to the chorus of Lob and jawbreaker.

It's very unlikely that you have any special need which will not be satisfied by OpenOffice. I would suggest you just switch. It will open all of your documents, and you should barely be able to tell the difference.

Ok, so tihs is good...Open office, will that run on XP and Vista, and if I transfer all my excel & word doc's etc, will I still be able to open them work on them etc in the same way. Sorry if this sounds dense, but if you try to imagine explaining things techy to something like a hamster....then that's my level.

This depends on how heavily formatted the documents you have are. If they are not heavily formatted see my PM that I just sent you. And don't despair, it ain't worth it.

You probably won't even notice the difference. Usually when somebody is visiting my desk they don't even notice that I'm opening documents in Open Office vs. MS Office.

Hi,

I think with Office there is a big difference between how you might use it at home compared to at home. Microsoft Office was always targeted at being for companies and Microsoft Works was the equivalent for home. However, because everyone was used to using Office at work they thought it made sense to use it at home.

In fact it may well be possible for you to get Vista and Office very cheaply if you company has an Enterprise Agreement with Microsoft then that might offer the home usage program which will allow you to purchase for a low price Office and Vista to run on your home machine.

OpenOffice will ok, if you like the functionality and look and feel of Office 97. For those proponents for Open Office what happens if you want to use Macros(VBA) is that also fully supported ? File formats are only one areas where you need to be careful.

In a home environment OpenOffice may be sufficient to cover your needs...it really depends what you want to do. In the end a lot of the time it is as much an emotional decision as anything else.

Have fun

Martin

Yes, Macros are supported. In fact you get your choice of visual basic, Python, JavaScript, and something called BeanShell.

I've yet to meet a word macro that doesn't just work.

M&PG,

I'm with Mark on this one, you should have no problems at all. They have an active and helpful support forum on their site. My guess is that your biggest challenge may be remembering what folder you put the old docs in. Do let us know if you find out otherwise, it'd be a bit of a surprise.

jb