Our nonprofit uses Excel to record bird banding data in the field. Prior to this year we used Excel 2010 but have upgraded to Excel 365. Our field sites do not have internet access. I'm led to believe that, as part of Office 365, Excel will revert to read-only mode if it isn't connected to the internet to validate the license within the last 31 days. This will cause us to revert to paper records until the laptop can be taken to a site with internet access.
We are developing a procedure for updating the license information but it is a manual process that could be missed.
I'd like to use VBA to check the time remaining until office 365 reverts to read-only mode and display an alert if there is less than a week until it does so. I don't know where the last connection date (the last time the office 365 license was validated by Microsoft) is stored.
While we have applied for extended offline access we don't have that yet. There are also other organizations that share our system that do not have IT support to install EOA.
You're right to be cautious. Microsoft 365 does require the device to connect to the internet about every 30 days to keep the license active. If it doesn't, Office apps go into reduced functionality mode (basically read-only).
Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t expose the actual license validation date or the number of days remaining in any way that's accessible via VBA or even PowerShell. It's all managed internally by the Click-to-Run service, and there’s no registry key or public API that provides a countdown.
That said, you can work around it by using VBA to log the last time the machine was online. On workbook open, check for an internet connection. If it's online, write the current date to a local text file or a hidden worksheet. Each time the workbook opens, compare today's date to that last online date. If you're getting close to 30 days, display a warning message.
You can probably find example scripts online that do this, or write a simple one yourself. It’s not too complex.