migrate HP Pre-Installed MS Office to another OS

[JohnnyFu2006]

Hi, I was forced to reinstall my notebook. However, I decided to get rid of all the preintalled Software by HP. So I am running a clean WIn10 x64 installation now, and I upgraded it from Home to Pro. I remember there was one software bundle that was actually usefull, Office 365. I miss Word and Excel now. I understand I will be able to recover the office-product-key from the original HP recovery image by recovering the whole image. To then extract the office-product-key from the OS somehow. 1. True? I really dont like the idea to be honest, it takes me hours to do that, maybe a whole day. 2. I am not sure if the office-product-key will active on my current Win10 Pro OS at all? 3. Any way to pull the office installation files from the HP recovery image? 4. What kind of office activation routine is that? I remember it activated automatically before? Any sugesstions on how to proceed?

[WAWood · Accepted solution]

@JohnnyFu2006

To answer your questions ...

1) Depends on how you recover the image.  If you made a full backup image of the OS partition and boot partition, then a restore of those will have the MS Office files included. But, if you do a factory reset, the MS Office files will most likely, NOT be restored as those aren't part of the factory prebuilt image.

2) The Office 365 is a subscription, and if you purchased that, it belongs to you.  The trial version that comes preloaded does not have a key and is not transferrable.

3) Basically, no.

4) Activation is different because (a) it's a subscription, not a one-time purchase, and (b) MS has dramatically changed the way that MS Office products are activated.

[JohnnyFu2006]

Thanks alot, appreciate your answer. 

Ok, that explaines everything to me.

Well, I have no backup from the first OOBE state of the machine. But I remember I restored the machine once, I think from the reocvery image and it still contained the Office trial. Not sure however. 

So I can simple try that way with the recovery image or just use Office 2013 with another license. Should be still good enough for my needs. And the easiest way for now, as I have limited internet and fast external storages to the other stuff.

Thanks for helping WAWood!