Hello all. This is my first post to this forum. I will endeavour to keep to all the rules. Please repost this if there is a more appropriate page than this one for these questions, and let me know if I am breaching any forum rules. I have a moderate level of knowledge and experience regarding IT systems. This is the version of windows I am currently using on my desktop PC: Windows 10 Version 22h2 (OS Build 19045.3570). I will now do my best to explain my predicament. Before today, I could use all office apps. Whilst I still had access to these apps, I would get yellow pop-ups (in Excel and Word for example) explaining my subscription had expired, therefore most features would be disabled at a date in the future. Despite these pop-ups, I could still use all the functions of these apps, and said date of this disabling seemed to be getting pushed back further and further in time. Today, I decided to uninstall Microsoft Outlook via: "settings > apps and features" Since doing this, I now appear to be totally locked out of all office applications. If I do manage to get past the launch pop up: "Sign in to get started with office" The three options being: Sign in or create account / I have a product key / close by selecting the option close, I can view my files, but most of the functions are now totally disabled. The error message is now in red and displays: (!) PRODUCT NOTICE most of the features of Word have been disabled because it hasn't been activated. Disconnecting to the internet, then trying to launch the apps does not work. Most of the functions have still been disabled. A potential fix that I have found for this issue, is to download a KMS (keymanagementservice). I have found a number of potential sites to download a KMS. So...taking all this into consideration, my questions are: 1) Is a KMS a safe and sensible solution to gain access to my office applications again? 2) Are there any versions and download sources that you would recommend? 3) Is there anything I need to be made aware of that a KMS will do to my system? And finally, just a general request: If anyone has the time, energy, knowledge, free time and enough of a will to live to try and explain why uninstalling outlook disabled access to Microsoft Office, please do so. Thanks in advance. >>> update >>> Just to add to this, I just realized that at some point today, after I had uninstalled outlook, I recvied an email from Microsoft with the title: "Your files are safe with OneDrive" The header of the email reads: "Your Microsoft 365 files are safe with OneDrive" The following email reads: "You may have recently used Word, Excel or PowerPoint and your files were saved to Microsoft storage. Your files are backed up and accessible from OneDrive on your desktop, mobile or browser. OneDrive comes with 5 GB of free storage or more with a paid subscription." There are numerous links in this email to take me to an online sign-in page for Microsoft. No idea if this will help with this case, but thought it might be worth adding to this post. I suppose when Microsoft say my files are "safe" with them, what they really mean is pay us now to regain access to your files.