Need to retrieve my Office Home and Student 2010 product key

Office guy 0 Reputation points
2026-10-08T19:42:24.4566667+00:00

Hi folks,

I have a 14 year old computer that I'm in the process of replacing however in the meantime I'm experiencing issues retrieving Word documents and saving data in Excel. I need to uninstall/reinstall but I have long since lost my product key - I bought the computer preinstalled from the vendor, but obviously the vendor has long since stopped supporting the product so that's not an option.

I tried to run the Repair option from Control Panel but it said it was missing an Office system file so it couldn't run - thus uninstall/reinstall is the only option to fix this.

How can I go about retrieving it?

Microsoft 365 and Office | Other
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  1. Rukshan edirisinghe 1,645 Reputation points
    2026-10-09T03:17:18.7166667+00:00

    Hi @Office guy

    I'm sorry to say a reinstall of Office 2010 isn't really an option anymore. Support for it ended on October 13, 2020, Microsoft no longer offers it for download, and they can't look up or reissue lost product keys. Since you're replacing the computer anyway, the safest move is to protect your files rather than repair the old install.

    1. Copy your Word and Excel files to a USB drive or an external disk now, before anything else changes on that old PC.
    2. On the new computer, sign in at office.com with a free Microsoft account and open the files in Word or Excel for the web. They open and save fine there at no cost.
    3. If you need the full desktop apps later, a current Office or Microsoft 365 version will open all your 2010 files without any conversion.

    Are your documents saved in the Documents folder, or somewhere else on that PC?

    If this resolved your issue, please consider accepting it as the answer. If you run into trouble moving the files, let me know and I'll be happy to keep helping.

    Reference:

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