The World According to Mitch

I am a huge believer in software licensing. If you are going to use a software, pay for the software. With that said, I am also a practical man who teaches a lot of courses, and am also a consultant who believes that companies should thoroughly test software before using it.

Microsoft Office 365 is a suite of applications that are ubiquitous, and to say that companies should test it before purchasing may be a stretch. However, in certain cases, there may be a reason for an application to be on a machine legitimately, but not be activated. In the case of the Office suite, when the activation fails, the applications go into a hobbled mode until they are properly activated. You can read documents, but not create and edit them.

This becomes a bit troublesome for the students of a Microsoft 365 course where creating and protecting documents is part of the curriculum, in which the lab environments were pre-created months ago.

Microsoft understands that there are cases where you should be able to completely and legitimately use their software for a period of time, before having to provide proper activation. In the Windows suite the tool to rearm the trial period is called slmgr.exe.  In Microsoft Office, it is called opsprearm.exe. Here’s how to do it:

1. Close all Microsoft Office applications.
2. Open an elevated Command Prompt.
3. Navigate to c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16\
4. Execute the command ospprearm.exe

That’s it. Once you do that, you will have extended the trial period. You cannot do this indefinitely, but it extends your grace period. Now go forth and sin no more!