I had a hard drive failure on my workstation recently and needed to look at an XLS spreadsheet file. I own a legal copy of "Microsoft Office SBE 2003 with BCM" but I had misplaced the original cardboard protective case for the CD - and the product code that's glued to it. The CD was fine in the hard plastic case that I use to safeguard my original media.

In desperation, I tried many of those serial number generators that you find so easily with google, but none worked ( on a crap pentium machine that I don't usually have connected to the internet or even turned on ). So I downloaded Open Office 2.3 to my workstation. It works.

Now I've found the original CD case and key for MS Office, but I can't think of a good reason to take the time to uninstall OpenOffice and reinstall MS Office. How do you channel guys compete with "free"?