How to transfer office activation to another account?

  • 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?


Solution 1:

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 ;-)

Solution 2:

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.