Microsoft Office Activation

[antonypg]

I was getting more and more annoyed with Microsoft Office again recently, the only software I ever have trouble with with migrating accounts or re-installing operating systems.

I have an iMac which I bought my daughter for university. She had installed a copy of Office 365 using a licence supplied to her by the university. This was working fine. When she bought the iMac back home I created an account on the iMac and I could also use Office without any problems.

I decided to update the iMac using a 1TB SSD, so I installed a fresh copy of Big Sur and used the migration assistant to copy the user accounts of the old hard drive. This all worked fine.

I bought a full version of Office which I attempted to install using my account. No matter what I did, it wouldn't activate. I tried un-installing, re-installing, running the licence removal wizard, running various other scripts on the Microsoft site, absolutely nothing would work.
Yesterday I asked my daughter to log into her account and she tried to run Word, and it came up unactivated. I then activated Office whilst in my daughters account, using my Microsoft account details, and it actually activated!!!! I then logged back into my account and now I too can use Office!!!!

All of this I find very annoying and confusing. Is there a hidden file somewhere on my machine which I couldn't remove? Did Office check my daughters account when I was logged into my account? Or is Office phoning home every time it is launched and comparing my machine ID to a list of know licences previously installed? What happens next time I want to re-install the operating system or change the hard drive?

 

[Tommo66]

I was getting more and more annoyed with Microsoft Office again recently, the only software I ever have trouble with with migrating accounts or re-installing operating systems.

I have an iMac which I bought my daughter for university. She had installed a copy of Office 365 using a licence supplied to her by the university. This was working fine. When she bought the iMac back home I created an account on the iMac and I could also use Office without any problems.

I decided to update the iMac using a 1TB SSD, so I installed a fresh copy of Big Sur and used the migration assistant to copy the user accounts of the old hard drive. This all worked fine.

I bought a full version of Office which I attempted to install using my account. No matter what I did, it wouldn't activate. I tried un-installing, re-installing, running the licence removal wizard, running various other scripts on the Microsoft site, absolutely nothing would work.
Yesterday I asked my daughter to log into her account and she tried to run Word, and it came up unactivated. I then activated Office whilst in my daughters account, using my Microsoft account details, and it actually activated!!!! I then logged back into my account and now I too can use Office!!!!

All of this I find very annoying and confusing. Is there a hidden file somewhere on my machine which I couldn't remove? Did Office check my daughters account when I was logged into my account? Or is Office phoning home every time it is launched and comparing my machine ID to a list of know licences previously installed? What happens next time I want to re-install the operating system or change the hard drive?

The most likely cause is that the licensing model used by the University probably has its own Activation server and the Mac is setup to point to that rather than the default MS ones. I don't know where this would be baked in on a Mac, but at least it is working for you now..

 

[chrfr]

The most likely cause is that the licensing model used by the University probably has its own Activation server and the Mac is setup to point to that rather than the default MS ones.

Corporate versions of Office for Mac don't activate the same way Windows versions do– they don't actually check in with a license server owned by the organization. Volume licensed copies don't do any sort of online checking, and Office 365 licensed copies check in with Microsoft directly.

 

[antonypg]

I believe my daughter had installed Office 365 using her university email address and password. She hadn't actually connected the iMac to the university network.

I was just surprised that I had so much trouble activating a newly bought copy of Office 2019 after replacing the hard drive and using a fresh copy of Big Sur. Maybe the problem was actually at the Microsoft end, I guess the Microsoft activation server keeps a copy of the machine ID and what has previously been activated.