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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,
by vetinari 3y ago
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).
- PinguTS 3y agoNope, 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.
- vetinari 3y agoWhat 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.
- PinguTS 3y agoThe 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.