KB5021751 now available for download from Microsoft Update

Jan 22, 2023 06:49 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has recently released a new update whose purpose is rather unusual this time: the company will use it to look for expired Office installations on Windows devices.

The new update, which is labeled as KB5021751, showed up earlier this week, and the folks over at the German site Deskmodder claim they received it on Windows 11. While Microsoft doesn’t provide such information, it looks like the same update is also released to Windows 10 devices, and given its purpose, this makes perfect sense.

Microsoft is pushing the update to all supported versions of Windows (currently only Windows 10 and Windows 11 continue to be serviced), so the company can accurately determine the Office installations that are available on the devices running the two operating systems.

Office 2013 approaching the end of support

According to the official KB page, Microsoft is specifically looking for Office 2007, Office 2010, and Office 2013 installations, though the reason why it needs such data hasn’t been disclosed. With Office 2013 projected to be retired in April 2023, there’s a chance that Microsoft wants to see how many devices are still running this old productivity suite.

“This update is intended to help Microsoft identify the number of users running out-of-support (or soon to be out-of-support) versions of Office, including Office 2013, Office 2010, and Office 2007. This update will run one time silently without installing anything on the user's device,” the company explains.

With Office 2013 approaching its end, Microsoft is probably working on the typical warnings that will start to be released to users who are still running the expiring productivity suite. Customers will obviously be recommended to switch to a newer version, though the go-to version will certainly be the subscription-based Microsoft 365 that keeps getting updates regularly.