Microsoft Office Experiencing Activation Issues on Mac and PC [Fixed]

[tjleonard]

I hear ya. Your business probably has a few SME's on-hand for situations like this to help assess and work through issues or apply suggestions from the IT Service. Cheers.

Considering this was only happening to my Mac, I played with this for two hours and got it working around 11:00am EST. I uninstalled Office, did the license cleanup (one of the scripts), and reinstalled a fresh copy. I’m glad I wasted 2 hours!!!

FYI for people still having the problem, I wouldn’t do everything I did...I would just wait for Microsoft.

 

[southerndoc]

Finally fixed.

 

[scottcampbell]

My IT guy typed a few things into Terminal and we were good to go

 

[pika2000]

This is not news. Office (and also Windows) experiences activation issues more often than not. It's like Microsoft doesn't have enough servers/data centers.

 

[ugahairydawgs]

Considering this was only happening to my Mac, I played with this for two hours and got it working around 11:00am EST. I uninstalled Office, did the license cleanup (one of the scripts), and reinstalled a fresh copy. I’m glad I wasted 2 hours!!!

FYI for people still having the problem, I wouldn’t do everything I did...I would just wait for Microsoft.

Went through the exact same hassle this morning only to have the support tech that called to tell me it was a widespread issue.

 

[Joe Rossignol]

Update: A spokesperson for Microsoft says "our team has addressed the issue and is continuing to monitor to ensure complete resolution."

 

[btrach144]

I moved on from Office long ago...

I'm curious as to what you use now and have you tried office again recently? Office really has turned around in the last 3-4 years.

 

[lec0rsaire]

iWork is cool. So is google docs. However there is really no replacement for Word and Excel. Specifically with Excel, I love VBA being built in. When you’re also used to work with macros in Excel, why fool around and try to do the same stuff with AppleScript? That’s just not very productive to have to learn how to do things a different way.

I use the standalone version of Office 2016 on Mac and imo it’s as close to Windows product as it’s ever been. I have had some problem using some add-ons that work fine on Windows versions but nothing I can’t live without.

 

[Makosuke]

Unusual when MS is more responsive to a Mac problem than a corporate Windows one

It's probably a coincidence, but people (myself included) have been getting a very similar dead-end error trying to install some enterprise versions of Office 2013 or 2016 on the latest release of Windows 10. There are currently a couple hundred "I have this problem too" flags over at the Microsoft Forums, but still not a peep from MS.

 

[Shirasaki]

Bring back non sub

There is a non-sub version called Microsoft office 2016 professional.

 

[fairuz]

IMO Office has a UI designed by kindergarten kids and a box of crayons, and Excel crashes way too much on Windows, never used Mac version, does it crash a lot too? Maybe it's just time to bite the bullet and move on. Why pay for something that is worse than all the free software out there?

Excel is definitely not worse than the free software, including Numbers. I've found no replacement for it.

 

[Markoth]

Would be nice if Microsoft were to someday realize that displaying a cryptic error code is not an acceptable practice, and generally means the developers were lazy. I've never had trouble coming up with descriptive error messages in my code, and apparently Microsoft could do it too if they wanted to. Most of the time, those error codes point to some help document. At least some of that help document's text should be used instead of the error code, I'd think anyway. I don't get how forcing the user to google some error code is still considered an acceptable practice within Microsoft.

 

[Morgenland]

This is going on with my work account for Office 365 right now. I received an email about it to activate it and the link takes you to a website that looks like the Microsoft activation site, but is really telemedicine.mn that has the Russian Cyrillic alphabet all over it.

Don't worry about it. Maybe Microsoft is trying to save money by hiring Russians.

 

[KPandian1]

Apple definitely missed the boat on this suite to become a major player, especially during their near bankrupt days, by investing in a cross-platform software.

Now that they are focusing on service revenue, a la Google, they should offer a better cluster of office ware.

They can't do worse than Google Docs or MS Office.

 

[pat500000]

There is a non-sub version called Microsoft office 2016 professional.

Oh...misread. I got mixed up with sub version

 

[Jimmy Bubbles]

I'm curious as to what you use now and have you tried office again recently? Office really has turned around in the last 3-4 years.

I use (when necessary) Pages, Numbers, & Keynote. They’re excellent!

 

[tjleonard]

I'm curious as to what you use now and have you tried office again recently? Office really has turned around in the last 3-4 years.

To your point, Microsoft has done a complete 180. Cloud things will go down, but they’re getting their mojo back.

 

[Cayenne1]

This technique fixed it for me:

- Close all Office programs
- Open Word
- Go to Word/Preferences/General
- Select "Show Document Gallery when Opening Word"
- Close Word
- Open Word

When Word opens you should see your Microsoft account name in the upper left of the Gallery.
The Activate Office line should no longer appears under the Outlook, Word, Excel, etc menu drop-down.

Why this worked I have no idea, but it did. It's Microsoft.

I was going crazy and trying to get to MS Chat support for hours. I read this technique while doing a search at the same time. It was a post from 2010 I think.

Hope this helps.

 

[Jimmy Bubbles]

I hadn't used Office in a long time but I was given an Office 365 account for University and started using it again. It's really fantastic. Office.com blows icloud.com out of the water.

To each their own. I had the opportunity to get a single-use copy for $15 while working for a university, however I was already too deep into the Apple ecosystem to be bothered/swayed.