Transferring old versions of MS Office

I have recently bitten the bullet and sourced my Dad a new PC to replace his old and imminently about to fail one. Transferring all of his stuff across should be slow but relatively painless.
The issue I have is with Office.. He still uses this daily with the old version he has (prob 8 or 11). Is there a fix to transfer this across or will MS ensure that 365 is forced on us? At this stage I don’t know if we will be able to find the product key? As his version is no longer supported, does the key even matter?

Pretty sure that only Office 2016 (aka v15.x) and later are supported on Windows 11 now.  Older versions are going to have security vulnerabilities anyway now that MS no longer provide updates for them so not a great idea to carry on with.

I think he may have to bite the bullet and get a newer version, or could you include him on a family plan covering multiple users/PCs if you or a sibling have one?

We are holding out with Win 10 until that is dropped (Oct 25?) as so much of his accumulated stuff is pretty old.
All of his office stuff is offline… Logging his solar energy, writing letters and other docs to print etc.
I don’t think he does change very well now (as I don’t either) and so Google docs / sheets are probably out too.

Know the feeling.  We faced an impossible task trying to get my father off Windows Live Mail, or whatever it was called in Vista, and onto Outlook let alone just using a browser for his gmail account.

Gave up in the end and somehow managed to get that installed on his new PC.

I paid £4.53 for ms 2016 a couple of weeks back so you should be able to install that relatively easily.

you can get non-365 keys from key resale sites e.g. ecokeys

The installer comes from microsoft.com so no risk of malware

That sounds promising. Thank you!

Reduce the pain by exporting his tool bars  and copying his Normal template (which defines how an empty document looks in Word, default fonts etc).

Other than that I am not sure MS Office has changed much over the years – default is now .docx etc but that might be it.

Good luck!

You cannot transfer it from the old PC, it doesn’t work like that.  You’ll need installation media – how was it installed in the first place? – and a licence key.  Depending on the version – “8 or 11” is not helpful, are talking about Windows 8? – it may be possible to extract it from the registry.

If he uses it “daily” I’d suggest biting the bullet with M365.  It’s like £6/month.

Basic versions of MS Office apps are free to use online.  You can sign up at office.com

You can buy an 2021 Office package download key for less than £20 (if that helps)