I find myself in a bit of a pickle, and not in a fun way like pickleball, which—combining elements from tennis, badminton, and ping-pong—is currently America’s fastest-growing sport.

Here’s the deal. A long, long time ago when I wore a younger man’s clothes, I purchased a copy of Microsoft Visio Standard 2010. It came in a box on a CD (that’s how old it is).

Since that time, whenever I’ve upgraded my computer, I’ve wiped my old machine (or recycled it) and loaded Visio on my new machine. I like this copy of Visio. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of later versions, but I know it inside and out.

Until relatively recently, I used the generic version of Microsoft Office. Last year (2021) I upgraded to Office 365. I’m a one-man company. I have a desktop PC in my office and a notepad PC at home, and I have Office 365 installed on both machines. Actually, I just took a look at my office machine, and my system says I’m running “Microsoft 365 Apps for Business.”

Last week, my office computer crashed and died, and I had to buy a new desktop PC. I love this new machine (32GB of DDR5, 2TB SSD… the list goes on), but there’s fly in the ointment and an elephant in the room (I never metaphor I didn’t like).

I just tried to load my copy of Visio on my new office machine, but the system said that I’d used up all of my installations.

The folks at the computer shop said that there might be a way for me to find out which previous machines were associated with the Product Key on my Visio disk and delete them so I could load it on my new machine.

If you have any suggestions on how I could do this, the radiance of my smile will fall upon you.