How to Extend Office 2021/2019/2016 & Office 365 Trial Period

When installing Office 2022/2019/2016 or Office 365, a user is offered to try the product for free for 30 days. After 30 days, your trial version of Office will expire and Office functionality will be partially blocked. The user will be prompted to purchase a license and activate the product (using a retail/MAK key or via Office KMS activation), or to uninstall Office completely. However, there is a little trick that allows you to extend your Microsoft Office free trial period up to 120 days.

Your trial has expired
Most of the features of Office Preview have been disabled. Choose an option below to reactivate.

Using OsppRearm.exe Tool to Reset MS Office Activation Grace Period

The MS Office package (both the classic MSI package of Office 2016/2013/2010 and the Click2Run distribution of Office 2021/2019/Office 365) includes a special ospprearm.exe tool, which is located in the directory:

• On 64-bit Windows versions with 32-bit Office version installed — %SystemDrive%\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16
• In other cases — %SystemDrive%\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16

Close all MS Office applications, the command prompt as an administrator, and go to the ospprearm tool folder:

cd %SystemDrive%\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16
To extend your trial version of Office for 30 days, run this command:
OSPPREARM.EXE

The following message will appear:

Microsoft Office rearm successful

If several different versions of MS Office are installed on the computer, an error will appear when running the ospprealm command.

There was an error when trying to rearm Office. You can try passing the SKU ID as a parameter. Passing the SKU ID is necessary if you are relying on an activation to permit an additional rearm.

Error: 0xc004f025

You need to specify the SKU ID of the Office version you want to rearm. List all Office SKUIDs on a computer:

cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus

Copy the SKUID and provide it as an argument to the command:

OSPPREARM.EXE d450596f-894d-49e0-966a-fd39ed4c4c64

You can also renew the Office trial license using the built-in slmgr.vbs tool:

cscript slmgr.vbs /rearm-app <Application ID>

You can get the application ID from the results of the slmgr.vbs /dlv all command.

Thus, you rearm your Office copy and extend the free trial to 30 days. You can run this command up to three (3) times before the trial expires. Thus, you can extend the total time of using the Office 2019/2016/365 trial version up to 120 days (4 * 30 days). You can check the current Office activation status and the number of days remaining until the end of the grace period as follows.

cd %SystemDrive%\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16
cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus

LICENSE DESCRIPTION: Office 16, Retail(grace) channel
LICENSE STATUS: ----OOB_GRACE----
ERROR CODE: 0x4004F00C
ERROR DESCRIPTION: The software Licensing Service reported that the application is running within the valid grace period.
REMAINING GRACE: 4 days (6499 minutes before expiring)

In this example, you can see that you have installed a trial version of Microsoft Office 2016 and there are 4 days left before the trial period ends.

When running the ospprearm.exe command:

• The trial period counter for Office resets to 30 days. The activation timer is frozen until the first launch of any of the Office apps;
• The computer CMID is reset (the KMS server determines unique clients according to CMID. You can check the current CMID of the computer using the ospp.vbs script – see the KMS activation FAQ).

Rearming Microsoft Office: Retail vs. Volume Edition

There are differences in extending the activation grace period in Retail and corporate (Volume) editions of Office. To understand which edition of MS Office is installed on your computer, open a command prompt and run the commands:

cd c:\Windows\System32
cscript slmgr.vbs /dlv all

This command will display information about all Microsoft products on your computer. Find the section in the list that refers to MS Office. For example, for Office 2019, you need to find the line:

Name: Office 19, Office19ProPlus2019xxx

In this example, the retail trial edition of Office is installed on the computer (Description: Office 19, RETAIL Grace channel). You can extend the trial period only 1 time (Remaining App rearm count: 1). The remaining period of use is 5 days.

If a corporate edition of Office 2019 is installed on the computer, for example, Office 19, Office19ProjectPro2019VL_KMS_Client_AE editionthen its description should look like Office 19, VOLUME_KMSCLIENT channel or Office 19, VOLUME_KMSCLIENT channel. The remaining trial period is 30 days, you can renew the license up to 3 times (Remaining App rearm count: 3).

Each time the license is extended via ospprearm.exe, the counter is decremented by 1. If the remaining number of rearms for the Office trial license is 0, you will receive error 0xc004d307 when running OSPPREARM.EXE.

There was an error when trying to rearm Office. You can try passing the SKU ID as a parameter. Passing the SKU ID is necessary if you are relying on an activation to permit an additional rearm.
Error: 0xc004d307
On a computer running Microsoft Windows non-core edition, run 'slui.exe 0x2a 0xc004d307' to display the error text.
Windows Activation. An error has occurred.
Description: The security processor reported that the maximum allowed number of re-arms has been exceeded.  You must re-install the OS before trying to re-arm again.

Resetting a trial Office license using ospprearm.exe is useful if you are preparing a Windows reference image with Office preinstalled to deploy on a users’ computers via WDS, SCCM, or to manually install the image. Before capturing a reference Windows image, you need to reset the activation counter with the ospprearm.exe command (and do not start any Office apps until the Windows image capture is complete). In this case, after deploying the Windows image on the user’s computer and after the first launch of any Office application, you can use Office without activation and restrictions for a full 30 days.