Office 2013 Product Key: Why You Should Move to Microsoft 365

If you are looking to change the product key on Office 2013 Home and Business, the more useful answer is that Office 2013 reached end of support on 11 April 2023 and no longer receives security updates. You can still change the key through the Office activation wizard, but a 2013 install is now a security liability, and for most businesses the right move is to migrate to Microsoft 365 rather than keep an unsupported version running.

Key facts

• Office 2013 reached end of support on 11 April 2023 and receives no further security updates, per Microsoft.
• The apps keep working after end of support, but unpatched vulnerabilities accumulate over time.
• You can change a retail Office 2013 product key through the activation wizard inside any Office app under File then Account.
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard is listed on the Australian Microsoft site and is the common upgrade path for SMEs.
• Office 2013 may also hit reliability issues connecting to Microsoft 365 services, which Microsoft stopped testing some years ago.

How do you change the product key in Office 2013?

For retail copies of Office 2013 Home and Business, you change the key through the activation wizard rather than the command line. Open any Office app such as Word, go to File then Account, and look for the option to change or enter a product key. Enter the new 25-character key and let it reactivate. If activation fails, it is usually because the key has already been used on its limit of devices or it is the wrong edition for the installed product.

That said, before you spend time chasing a key, it is worth asking whether you should be reactivating a 2013 install at all.

Why move off Office 2013?

Office 2013 is unsupported software, which means any vulnerability found after April 2023 stays unpatched on your machines indefinitely. For a business that handles client data, that is a real exposure under the Privacy Act 1988 and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, because running known-vulnerable software undermines the “reasonable steps” you are expected to take to protect personal information. It is also a productivity drag: the apps are over a decade old and miss features your staff now expect.

Across the Sydney SMEs we onboard, an old Office version is one of the most common things we find still in use, usually on one or two machines that quietly never got upgraded. (Nobody plans to run Office 2013 in 2026; it just happens.)

What should you upgrade to instead?

For most small businesses, Microsoft 365 Business Standard is the natural replacement, because it bundles the desktop Office apps with hosted Exchange email, OneDrive, and Teams on a per-user subscription. Pricing is listed in Australian dollars ex GST on the Microsoft Australia site, and because it updates automatically you stop having to think about end-of-support dates altogether. If you only need the desktop apps without the cloud services, a one-off purchase of the current Office is also an option, though most businesses get more value from the subscription.

Frequently asked questions

Will Office 2013 stop working now that it is out of support?

No. The applications continue to launch and function after end of support. What stops is security updates, bug fixes, and technical support from Microsoft, which means the software grows more vulnerable over time rather than failing outright. End of support is a security milestone, not an off switch.

Can I just keep using Office 2013 if I am careful?

You can, but it is not advisable for a business. Unpatched software is a standing risk regardless of how careful individual users are, and it can weaken your position if you ever have to demonstrate reasonable security steps after an incident. The cost of a Microsoft 365 subscription is usually far smaller than the risk it removes.

How do I move my old Outlook data to Microsoft 365?

Your email, contacts, and calendar can be migrated to Microsoft 365 either through a server-side migration or by exporting and importing mailbox data, depending on where the mail currently lives. The right method depends on your starting point, so it is worth planning rather than improvising. This is exactly the kind of cutover we manage for clients.

If you have got Office 2013 still running on a few machines and want a clean path onto Microsoft 365 without losing email or files, that is a standard job for us. Happy to scope it out for your business.