Office 2007 upgrade

Unfortunately, no. Office has to be installed fresh. You cannot transfer application installs when an operating system change takes place, regardless of whether the change was from a fresh install, or an upgrade install.

I figured that I couldn't just transfer it over. What I was hoping is that there is a way to use the cloned drive to prove to the upgrade disk that I have a copy of Office so that it let's me install fresh on the new computer. I may be hoping for too much and just need to fork out $40 for Works 9 and make this easy. It irks me to have to spend $40 more though. Any chance this is possible?

Nope. The Office disk has no way of loading registry hives from the clone (regardless of whether the clone is in the form of a Ghost image, or a sector-copied separate physical hard drive) to verify that the program is installed. Even if you managed to mount the cloned registry hives, the installer on the Office disk simply isn't written to check for the presence of something like that.

And don't take this the wrong way, but it should have occurred to you that your programs would need to be reinstalled after you did that clean install of Windows 7. When it comes to an upgrade or migration install, I understand why some people get confused about that part (their line of thinking being "It says it's going to save my data, so the programs themselves will still be there too, right"), but I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the people doing clean installs.

The clean install wasn't the plan. It left me no other option(if i wanted to upgrade). I planned ahead and have every other program I use re-installed. Office is the only problem. Although, the clean install has let me get rid of a ton of items cluttering the computer that never get used anymore, so that is a good thing.

Office 2003 was pre-installed on the laptop when it was purchased and I have been through everything that came with it and there is not a disk that will help me. I am sure I should have received something, but it didn't happen and I didn't check at the time.

I guess I am off to Fry's tomorrow for Works 9   At least when it comes down to it, it is a fairly cheap fix.