Office 2010 Cannot Read License - Activation Issue

Question

I have had Office 2010 on a Dell Latitude for 6 years. About a week or two back it wouldn't open the Office programs saying, "license not found". So I went to the new website [aka.ms/aoh] and submitted the Installation ID I had saved in a text file.

It returned the same Confirmation ID that I already stored in text. So I put that back into the boxes and (as it told me), closed Excel and reopened it. Now it says it cannot read this Confirmation ID and I need to fix the installation in Control Panel.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

Hello @Alex Michaels

Since Office 2010 is specifically telling you to repair the installation, I'd try that before entering the Confirmation ID again.

Go to: Control Panel → Programs → Programs and Features → Microsoft Office 2010 → Change → Repair → Continue

Restart Windows after the repair completes, then open Excel and check the activation status again.

One important point: a previously saved Confirmation ID isn't necessarily reusable. Phone activation generates a Confirmation ID from the Installation ID for that particular activation state. If Office generates a different Installation ID after a licensing change or repair, the old Confirmation ID may no longer be valid.

You can also check Office's current licensing state from an elevated Command Prompt.

For 64-bit Office:

cd /d "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office14"
cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus

For 32-bit Office on 64-bit Windows:

cd /d "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Office\Office14"
cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus

This should show the installed Office edition, license status, and last five characters of the product key.

Keep in mind that Office 2010 reached end of support on October 13, 2020, so Microsoft no longer provides technical support, bug fixes, or security updates for it.

If Repair doesn't resolve it, please post the output of ospp.vbs /dstatus with the product key information/redacted identifiers removed. That should help determine whether the problem is the Office licensing store, the installed product key, or activation itself.

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