Change the Office 2007 CD Key

I had a situation where I had entered the office CD key for the wrong computer in the office onto another computer (I hate having 10 different license keys). When trying to activate I would get an error. My options were uninstall and reinstall, call Microsoft Support and have them laugh at me for being stupid or do the following steps below.

To change the office 2007 CD key follow these steps:

1. Make sure all Microsoft Office applications are closed.
2. Click Start, click Run, type regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.
3. Navigate to the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration

   Note You may also find another subkey that resembles the following subkey:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Registration\{91120000-0011-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}

4. If you find additional subkeys that reference Microsoft 12.0 registration, open each subkey, and then identify the product by the ProductName entry.
   For example: ProductName=Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007
5. When you find the subkey for the product from which you want to remove the existing product license key, delete the following entries:
   • DigitalProductID
   • ProductID
6. Exit Registry Editor.

Now open up any of your Office 2007 applications and you will be prompted for a new product license key. Pop in the correct key and Click Continue then Install Now. After a short period of time Office will be reconfigured and you can reactivate Office.

Create a Random Number for use as Passwords with Excel

As a network administrator you will most likely get asked to create a list of users and import those users into a new application or domain. I’ve found that creating these users in Excel and saving as a CSV file to be the easiest way to do this for most circumstances as excel is great with working with tabled data and you can manipulate strings.

To create a random number of any length to be used as a password I tend to use the following function within excel:

=((RAND()*(10-1))+1)*100000)

This will create a 6 digit number between 100000 & 999999. For a 4 digit password replace the 100000 with a 1000.

Next you will need to remove the decimal places. Do this by clicking on the “Format Cells: Number” button circled in the picture below.

Next select Number from the category and place a zero in the decimal places section.

Now save the document out as a CSV and away you go.

The command is not available. See the program documentation about how to use this extension.

This error occors sometimes in Outlook 2003 when trying to set the Out of Office Assistant. To fix this:

1. Open Outlook.
2. Click on Help -> About Microsoft Office Outlook.
3. Then click on Disabled Items on the bottom right hand side. Click on “Addin: outex.dll (outex.dll)” and click the enable button.

You can also delete the registry key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Resiliency” which does the same as the above but the first part is easier to talk customers through.