How to Fix Installed Office 2021 Shows Up as Office 2016

Installed Office 2021 but it says Office 2016 ProPlus

In some cases, you’ve installed Microsoft Office 2021, but when you open any Office app, it shows up as Microsoft Office 2016 Pro Plus app instead of Office 2021.

When you open an Office app | File | Accounts. It says you have Office 2019 Pro Plus.

Fix Office 2021 Shows as Office 2016 Professional Plus

Usually this is caused by legacy license entries/serial number/key left in the register/system. Thus it is recognized as Office 2016.

To fix it, we can simply delete/remove all old serial number/key entries using Windows Command Prompt.

1. Close all opening Office applications.

2. Search cmd then right click on Command Prompt, select Run as administrator.

3. Copy, paste all below commands into Command Prompt window then hit Enter to navigate to the installation location of Microsoft Office.

if exist "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office16\ospp.vbs" cd /d "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office16"
if exist "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Office\Office16\ospp.vbs" cd /d "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Office\Office16"
cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus

4. As you can see, the product key of Office 2016 still cache in the system. We need remove it from Command Prompt. From the output, if we look carefully, we will see lines looks like below:

Last 5 characters of installed product key: XXXXX

If we have multiple Office products installed, we may see similar lines multiple times from the output, if we are having problem with all Office products, we need to note down all of those lines which includes the “Last 5 characters of installed product key”.

5. To remove the legacy license keys, we can use the following command (Where XXXXX is the “Last 5 characters of installed product key”) we have noted from the output from previous step.

cscript ospp.vbs /unpkey:XXXXX

6. Open any Microsoft Office apps to verify it works.