Product Key for Office 2016 Deleted During Repair

As people have pointed out, finding the product key is a pointless exercise as it seems Microsoft will prevent it from being used again (though the fair action when removing "Proof of Purchase" would be to splat the record that it has been used).

On examining another installation of Office 2016, it appears that the Repair deletes a whole swag of Registry entries and shifts folders to \Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root (though this could be due to comparing the 32bit version with the 64bit).  So I attempted to replace the Registry entries and the program files into their proper places to no avail.  I now have given up and instead Remote Desktop to a workstation which has the software I need, from my laptop (which is the one that had Office 16 immobilised by Microsoft)

The moral of the story is to create a full system restore point before embarking on a software upgrade, even when in response to an invitation from Microsoft.

Many thanks to the MVP's which responded to my initial request for assistance.

Regards

Pete

Thanks Stefan.

As I said to Lattanino, I was hoping to translate the message in the Event log to provide the key.  Probably means I need someone who is skilled in interpreting Event logs rather than in Microsoft licencing.  Any idea where I could look?

Regards

Pete

Thanks for the suggestion. I have tried the MS\contactus suggestion but it is pretty difficult to get hold of a human at Microsoft these days.

I was really hoping to be able to convert the product code given in the Event log into the characters required to reactivate the product.  I'm not sure the help desk staff at Microsoft will be able to assist in that task.

Anyway, thanks, I will persevere.

Regards

Pete

See the article at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/i-forgot-the-username-or-password-for-the-account-i-use-with-office-eba0b4a2-c0ae-472c-99f6-bc63ee2425a8.

Welcome Pete,

I'm an independent advisor and I'm here to help you. The product key is not required to reinstall Office. You should log in with the Microsoft account with which you have associated the Office license on https://account.microsoft.com/ and, on the page select Services and subscriptions, locate the Office product you want to install and select Install. For more details see here: https://support.office.com/article/7c695b06-6d1...

If you don't remember the account used to associate the Office license, I suggest you contact Microsoft Support. This is a user community and we do not have access to user data.

https://support.microsoft.com/contactus/

https://support.microsoft.com/help/4051701/glob...

Regards.