'Get genuine Office' banner

Experiencing the persistent "Get Genuine Office" banner can be frustrating, even for legitimate users. This intrusive notification often signals underlying activation issues, particularly with KMS servers or specific Office installations. Understanding the root causes and implementing the correct solution is key to a seamless Office experience.

'Get genuine Office' banner — figure 1

Why does the banner appear?

Here are the possible reasons:

  • Office Click-to-Run builds (since February 2021) that are activated with KMS check for the existence of a KMS server name in the registry. If the KMS server is not present, a banner is shown in Office programs notifying that "Office isn't licensed properly."
  • If 32-bit Office is installed on 64-bit Windows, Office checks for the KMS server existence in the corresponding WOW6432Node registry key as well.
  • Office also detects if the registered KMS server is on its blacklist. The following three adddresses are known to be blacklisted:
    km-s8.MSG-uides.com km-s9.MSG-uides.com 0.0.0.0 (Without hyphens)
    The first two are public KMS servers, and the last one is not a real IP.
  • The checks above are not performed if the Volume version of Office is properly installed using the PerpetualVL2019 or PerpetualVL2021 channel.
    However, Microsoft has not yet updated these checks for the release of the PerpetualVL2024 channel. As a result, if any of the above conditions are met, Office will show a banner even to genuine customers.

Solution

  • Use MAS to activate Office.

info

A similar banner may appear if you are not properly logged into Office with your Microsoft account. You will need to go to the Account tab in Office and either resolve the issue or sign out of your account.

'Get genuine Office' banner — figure 2

Additional help

Get MAS from the official project

This site does not host its own build of the scripts. The buttons below go to the project’s own repository and mirrors, so what you get is what the developers published.

Download from official repositoryView official releasesView source

PowerShell one-liner published by the project:

irm get.activated.win | iex

Check the domain before running it, and see how to verify what you run.

Activation tooling is routinely classified as riskware by antivirus software. That is expected for this category and is not by itself evidence of malware — nor proof that a particular copy is clean. Verify the source before running anything.