Activate Office 2007

[akac]

I don't use Office 2007 much, but due to a presentation I'm doing I am using PowerPoint 2007 here. Its a requirement for this presentation due to the template I'm forced to use.

Now my Parallels VM is a BootCamp VM. Everytime I boot into Parallels or Bootcamp, Office asks me to activate - again. I have to boot into BootCamp when I need to present the presentation due to video performance but when I edit it I'd prefer not to have to reboot.

I don't remember having to do this with Office 2003. Any ideas? Its an MSDN Office 2007 Ultimate install.

 

[bpdougd]

Ah, if that is so, then this is a very useful tip. Thank you.

However, future activation mechanisms may change and this may no longer work. In order to avoid any problems related to activation I will continue to avoid softwares with activation mechanisms. We should show these companies that these mechanisms are not welcomed and vote with our wallet, especially in this era of virtualization software.

Good luck. I use MS apps because the company I do most of my contract work for requires it: MS Word and Excel docs that are awkward to deal with using any of the alternatives, a VPN implementation that only works with Windows, etc.

However, you can get locked in by your own choices. Imagine for a moment that Adobe implemented the same intrusive level of activation on all their applications. They own the graphic design and photo post processing market. Do you think that thousands of graphic design professionals are going to voluntarily go out of business by boycotting Adobe as a matter of principle? Not gonna happen.

I hate this stuff as much as anyone and avoid Microsoft whenever possible as a matter of both principle and practice: principle because I think they are a particularly bad corporation and practice because I think most of their products are overpriced, poor performing, and have better equivalents elsewhere. But I have no illusions that the lack of my patronage will make any difference in their behavior.

regards
Doug Dickerson

 

[mdl]

In short.

I am looking into this product. In short, do I have to type in an activation key each time I open an instance of office 2007 within XP?

Thanks!!

 

[James Bond 007]

Good luck. I use MS apps because the company I do most of my contract work for requires it: MS Word and Excel docs that are awkward to deal with using any of the alternatives, a VPN implementation that only works with Windows, etc.

However, you can get locked in by your own choices. Imagine for a moment that Adobe implemented the same intrusive level of activation on all their applications. They own the graphic design and photo post processing market. Do you think that thousands of graphic design professionals are going to voluntarily go out of business by boycotting Adobe as a matter of principle? Not gonna happen.

I hate this stuff as much as anyone and avoid Microsoft whenever possible as a matter of both principle and practice: principle because I think they are a particularly bad corporation and practice because I think most of their products are overpriced, poor performing, and have better equivalents elsewhere. But I have no illusions that the lack of my patronage will make any difference in their behavior.

regards
Doug Dickerson

Perhaps you are right, but I (and you probably?) will not be held ransom to this bad behaviour exhibited by these companies : Microsoft, Symantec and many others. If they do not care about me, fine. They have seen the last of my money. I have paid for legitimate licenses for Windows XP and Office in the past but I will no longer do so.

And yes, people who have to use Adobe products have little choice so they will have to put up with this activation headache, that is if they want to stay legal. I wish them good luck, because they will need it if problems arise. And people who uses pirated Adobe products will not have this problem since cracks for the activation mechanisms can be easily found on the internet. I tried one of the Photoshop CS2 cracks myself sometime ago just to see if the crack works (I do not use Photoshop CS2 myself and I have since removed it), and it worked great.

Not to encourage piracy, but isn't it ironic that pirates do not have to suffer this problem?

I won't accept these activations as a part of life, and I will continue to encourage all people to seek other alternatives whenever possible, even though as you said it may not make any difference in these companies' behaviour. At least they won't have my money anymore.

 

[bfl]

Used the wired MAC address

If you activated your copy of MS Office while running Windows within Boot Camp, you will have to reactivate within the Parallels VM. If you want this reactivation to be "sticky" and apply to both Boot Camp and the Parallels VM, the easy fix is to change the MAC address that the Parallels VM uses to be the same as the actual hardware MAC address. Simply open Parallels (but do not start the VM). Go to the Edit> Virtual Machine menu Select Network Adapter, choose Advanced and type in the hardware MAC address. (You can find the hardware address by going to System Preferences, Network, Ethernet.)

This works for me for all the Windows apps that I have that require activation. They all appear to decide whether or not the computer they are running on has changed based on the MAC address. This makes sense since that is one thing that is guaranteed to be unique. Windows itself is a little trickier but Parallels solved that one for us already.

regards
Doug Dickerson

Just want to chime in here that you want to use the wired mac address and not wireless one. I guess it's obvious after the fact. Thanks Doug!

Ben

 

[PeteD]

This works for me for all the Windows apps that I have that require activation. They all appear to decide whether or not the computer they are running on has changed based on the MAC address. This makes sense since that is one thing that is guaranteed to be unique. Windows itself is a little trickier but Parallels solved that one for us already.

Well, ironically it's actually *not* guaranteed to be unique. Most network adapters allow the user to override the default hardware address. In fact, I use this feature to allow me to set the VM's MAC address to be the same as the Boot Camp MAC address, while still having both of them different from the actual hardware address Mac OS X uses.

And for what it's worth, I used the MAC address for the wireless adapter. I would guess that which MAC address is required may vary according to how exactly Office was installed and maybe even varies randomly.

I disagree with the negative characterizations of Microsoft and their software, but I suppose that's a pointless discussion. To each his own, I guess. I have found the publisher of Parallels to be about as unhelpful a company as I've ever seen, and Mac OS X has locked up my MacBook Pro at least once a month in the four months I've owned it so far, which is far more frequent than I've ever seen Windows XP "blue-screen". Microsoft's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they don't seem any worse than any other company either. The whole software industry could use a "premium" brand to lead the way to better-performing and more-reliable software, and so far none seems to exist.

Pete