Microsoft Office Activation Questions

[MME1122]

Hello everybody,

First and foremost, I have Office 2010 on my current laptop, but I'll most likely be selling it and purchasing a new one. Can I transfer my license and install Office on the new machine with the same product key?

The license was purchased as a physical disc from a retail store with 3 products keys in it. It was the office home and student edition. Since I'm a student, I upgraded one of those keys to office 2010 Professional Academic. This gave me a new product key, which is what I'm using now. As far as I know, the original product key cannot be used on another computer. The other two licenses are being used for other laptops.

Which brings me to my next question.

I remember reading that with each product key, you are allowed one 'stationary device', such as a desktop and one 'mobile device', such as a laptop. Can anybody confirm this for me? How does it work, and would the product be fully featured on both machines?

Ideally, I would like to use my professional academic license on my desktop and my new laptop, and then on of the other 2 keys on a laptop and a netbook.

I'd appreciate any help on this, since Microsoft's support is very difficult to use and the licensing is difficult to understand. Thank you

[macropod]

Hi MME1122,

First off, some clarification:
When you buy a retail copy of MS Office, you get only 1 license. That license entitles you to install the software on whatever hardware the End-User Licence Agreement (EULA) specifies. That entitlement varies by edition and purchase type. See 'Pricing and licensing' at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/pr...101674631.aspx for an outline. For the full details, download the set from: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en...17777&id=13653.
The Academic editions are different, in that they are multi-license (volume license) products. See: http://www.microsoft.com/education/e.../eligible.aspx

You also say you've upgraded to Office 2010 Professional Academic. I don't think that's possible. Whilst you can buy an Academic license cheaply, I don't believe it's an upgrade as such. If it were, you would no longer be entitled to use whatever edition (eg Home 7 Student) or version (eg Office 2007) you upgraded from.

As for transferring the license to a new system, that's entirely in order. You should uninstall it from the old one first, though. If you end up nominally exceeding the number of platforms on which MS thinks you're entitled to, the most you'll need to do is to give them a call. There are various links from the last mentioned site above that might be worth checking out, as it's not at all clear from what you've posted which Academic licensing arrangement applies in your case.