Mac Forum / Applications / MS Office / July 2005

I have been working for a small Macintosh based company, with about 90% of
their users still on Office V.x.  Before I came along they did not keep any
kind of a log or track as to which copy of Office was installed onto which
machine.  During initial installation of systems this was not a problem
(since they just used the number that was purchased with the system), but
now that this connection is lost and machines are needing to be reinstalled
we are getting quite a few cases of duplicate serial numbers.

Poking around this list and on the 'net via Google, I have found that by
deleting the file "Carbon Registration Database", "Office Registration Cache
X", and "Microsoft Office Settings (10)" I can change the number of Office.
Furthermore by saving these files before reformatting a machine and then
putting it back in the same place I can in effect "move" the serial number
from system to system.

However I am also trying to come up with a master list where I link each
computer's serial number to an Office serial number.  The problem is that I
have no way of figuring out which Office license number was used on which
machine, since Office never displays the full serial number, the number that
it generates is not consistent to the serial number originally entered and I
cannot read the contents of these three office files.

So, is there any way to somehow read from an installed copy of Office which
serial number it was installed with?

Thanks,
Peter