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0 pointsvetinari2y ago0 comments

They require Microsoft account, not an outlook.com address; though that address is an easy way to get the account. It is used for activation/license management, one nice feature is that you can yank a license on a dead device and use it with your new one.

Outside of activation, it is easy to use MS Office for Mac completely offline -- there's a checkbox for that in preferences. You will lose some marginal functionality, some of which I prefer to be disabled (like generating pdfs of your documents server-side instead of client-side).

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PinguTS2y ago

Nope, a Microsoft account is not enough. It must be an @outlook.com address, or any registered company/school/university address.

It took me almost 3 days to find the problem. Microsoft changed that and between all "answers" there is only one single thread in the Microsoft forums that had the solution.

vetinariOP2y ago

What does "any registered company/school/university address" mean?

Some years ago, I activated some Office licenses using my company email; we never did any hosting with O365 or whatever was it's predecessor, and at the time, everything went fine. All I had to do was to create live account using that email address.

PinguTS2y ago

The error message is along the lines: "You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school instead".

Which means, that you need to associate your existing account with an @outlook.com address. It seems, that Microsoft changed that requirement somewhere in 2020/2021.

Yes, previously Microsoft account with whatever email address was enough. But they changed that.

I stumbled upon that while upgrading to new hardware, which requires new activation of the Office products.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

PinguTS2y ago

Nope, a Microsoft account is not enough. It must be an @outlook.com address, or any registered company/school/university address.

It took me almost 3 days to find the problem. Microsoft changed that and between all "answers" there is only one single thread in the Microsoft forums that had the solution.

vetinariOP2y ago

What does "any registered company/school/university address" mean?

PinguTS2y ago

The error message is along the lines: "You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school instead".

Which means, that you need to associate your existing account with an @outlook.com address. It seems, that Microsoft changed that requirement somewhere in 2020/2021.

Yes, previously Microsoft account with whatever email address was enough. But they changed that.

I stumbled upon that while upgrading to new hardware, which requires new activation of the Office products.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse