Hacker News Reader

Does the activation still work for these are do you have to use a hack to get them running? I still have a TON of older Office 2003 licenses, I'd love to go back. I've hated modern Office with the ribbon for half my life now.

View on HN

The product keys still work. You can skip online activation. Only annoyance is needing to run once as admin to make the EULA acceptance write to the registry.

I have a stockpile of patches that I preserved a while back that are not readily available today.

Please don't. There are so many unpatched exploits for old Office... opening any document could trash your whole system or silently steal information from you.

Just like a current Office does?

maybe so but that would imply the end user is opening sketchy files - most of the time these products are for low risk files

Reply on news.ycombinator.com