Find your Microsoft Office license key

recovering/showing product keys and serial numbers for MS office

It can be an IT nightmare to re-install software.  Many times, there’s no paper trail to lead you to the product keys that were used for the installation of Microsoft Office.  But since XP and Vista have tied those product keys to the machine the software is installed on, you’ve got to find a way to retrieve the product keys before you can begin the re-installation process.  Obviously, this article will require that you have Microsoft Office already installed on the machine, and simply need to find out what the product key is, so that you can re-install, for instance, to put in a new hard drive.

The good news is that someone has been through the nightmare before you, and there have been keyfinder programs developed to help resolve the situation.  The Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is one such program, and can be used to retrieve the product keys for Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, and even MS Server 2003 and 2008.  For Microsoft office, it can find the keys for all versions except MS Office 2000, and even that one may have been added by the time you read this.  This list does not include all of the keys that keyfinder will dig out for you, but many of the others pertain to Microsoft games, and are beyond the scope of this article.

The magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is not an installed program on the computer it is used on.  Simply unzip the file package into a folder of your choosing, and run it.  There are no set up wizards, no complicated processes, and nothing that one could consider fancy.  It is designed to do one thing, retrieve product keys from the system registry.  As soon as you run the program, it will scan the registry, and “discover” what keys exist for you.

Even though the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is not designed as a software piracy tool, it is sometimes categorized that way, and the methods it uses may even be interpreted by your virus software as a malicious program at work.  For this reason, it may be a good idea to disconnect the network connection and temporarily disable virus protection before using the tool.  Be sure to enable virus protection again when you have finished using the Magical jelly bean!  This utility is not a product key generation tool!  If you do not have a successfully installed version of the software on the machine, using the Magical Jelly Bean won’t be of any use in finding a product key.

To get the Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder, visit:
http://www.magicaljellybean.com/

Article written by MyComputerAid.com