9
  • I have bought two licenses for Office 2016 Home & Student (the permanent licenses, not the 365 subscription).
  • Due to some auto-signup, cookies and product-keys-encoded-in-a-url supplied by the vendor and also my ignorance regarding the modern-software-licensing-mechanisms, I accidentally registered two licenses for one Microsoft Office account A (created ad hoc).
  • I have found no option, how to transfer one of the activations to another account B.

Is there any method, how to do it?

sharpener
  • 433

3 Answers3

13

As I have spent several hours looking for a solution and was ready to give it up, I would like to share the experience and result (might get handy for someone):

  • There is really no option in the Microsoft Office account environment to transfer one activation to another accout.
  • But, although I don't like these products and their vendor very much (I do it for people who are not part of "IT crowd" and just want to pay for MS Office), I have to admit, the Microsoft got some up-votes today:
  • You can use the "microsoft support chat"
    • firstly there is some automatic "person-like-algorithm" you simply kick out by one sentence,
    • then it switches to real person and he/she is able to do it.
  • I expressed the problem,
  • I gave them the account A name, they
    • deleted one activation on account A (all office instances must be uninstalled - they do not see the product keys and even the installation status),
    • sent me an email (to arbitrary address) with some sort of "reactivation link",
    • I visited it, logged in to the account B,
    • the activation was transferred to the account B.
  • This was performed nicely, politely, quickly, professionally. What the ...? That's not my regular support experience.

They provide weird products, but have nice support. I hope this is not a lucky exception ;-)

sharpener
  • 433
1

I had the same issue. Office 2016 Home and Student that i needed to transfer to a different account. I called the Phone support on https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus/ and they said it is not possible to resolve the issue. I then re-tried it with the CHAT agent and they immediately de-activated it from the first account.

user709328
  • 11
0

I also had the same issue here. my colleague activated a copy of office 2016 home & business retail version using his personal ms office account on my company owned new pc.

I called the ms office product support, I told him the situation and asked him to transfer the activation to the my company's ms office account. he said he can't do it, because once the key in the retail version of office 2016 is registered, it's bound together with the ms office account forever.

benedict
  • 11