Access hardware windows license from virtual machine

Hi all,

I'm currently running Ubuntu on my machine, but I want to access some windows products like Office. I've read from other posts that the license that I used for my previous Windows install is likely still on my laptop's hardware; when I got my laptop Windows came pre-installed with it.

I don't want to give up my Ubuntu setup, so I was thinking of running Windows in virtualbox. Doing that, though, Windows can't seem to find that license. Is there any way I can manually find the license key on my hardware, while running Ubuntu? The next step that I can think of would be to fully dual-boot with Windows, activate it, copy down the license key, then go back to my virtual machine and enter it there.

Thanks again.