MS Office issue with restore

[Rod]

A friend has asked me a curly one;
She has an old damaged MBP 2009 running OS Mavericks. The hard drive died but she had a CCC backup so she has been running it off that. She has purchased a new MBP but has not restored it from her CCC clone yet. This is because she has MS Office 2009 on her CCC backup but not her original registration code. It being a single user licence she is concerned that should she transfer it to her new computer it will require her user information and registration code. She no longer has the install CD.
To complicate matters while using Excel the other day an "essential" update was suggested for Excel which she applied, now it will not open Excel files because it does not recognise the CCC backup drive.
She has contacted MS but no replies.
I realise this is complicated but any suggestions would be much appreciated. I am happy to help her with this but not sure which path to take short of purchasing a new 2011 version of MS Office to install on her new MBP and physically transferring her files and apps across to her new MBP.

 

[chscag]

I realise this is complicated but any suggestions would be much appreciated. I am happy to help her with this but not sure which path to take short of purchasing a new 2011 version of MS Office to install on her new MBP and physically transferring her files and apps across to her new MBP.

I'm assuming she has MS Office 2008 not 2009 as there is no such version. Without the serial number to reinstall Office 2008 and no disk, I'm afraid she's out of luck. And I wouldn't advise her to purchase Office 2011 since Microsoft will soon be releasing Office 2014 for the Mac. In the meantime, have her download one of the free Office suites instead. Open Office and LibreOffice are both free and will open, edit, and save MS Office documents.

 

[Rod]

Thank chscag, yes little typo there, 2008 it is. She had a work deadline to meet so was somewhat flustered. Of course if she had not downloaded the "essential" update none of this would be a problem. I suggested 2011 because she is a little short of funds and with the new version coming out I thought it might be relatively cheap.
I did suggest Open Office as I use it myself but because of her deadline she was concerned about issues that might occur sending docs to a second party eg. her employer.
Thank you for confirming my suspicions. I'll pass it on and suggest she join MacForums.