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I've been using Office 365 Home for a few years now. This year I started at university which provides us with Office 365 Student licenses, which are probably bound to our school accounts (they come with school Outlook mailboxes). I'd like to know if it is possible to use those with my current account somehow. I heavily use OneDrive, I depend on OneNote, all those will probably redirect to new and empty structures coming with Student account, right? Could I merge those somehow?

edit: It's not really about merging storage together but about saving annually $100 which is price of Office 365 Home. If I am already provided with the Student license it doesn't make much sense to pay again for the pretty much the same service. Is it bad idea..?

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  • Why would you want to try to merge them? Are you thinking that the OneDrive storage space in your university Office 365 account is going to waste right now and that merging it with your Office 365 Home OneDrive storage would allow you to make use of it?
    – Mr Ethernet
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 13:46

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I heavily use OneDrive and depend on OneNote.

All those will probably redirect to new and empty structures coming with the Student account, right?

Yes. They are separate Office 365 accounts under two different Office 365 tenants.

The student OneDrive account that your university provides will start off empty.

Could I merge those somehow?

No. This won't be possible as the two OneDrive accounts are under completely separate Office 365 tenants.

Not only is there no way to merge this OneDrive storage space but I don't see why you would want to do so anyway. When you eventually graduate from university, you'll go back to only having your own Office 365 account, so a merged OneDrive account (if it was possible) would eventually have to return to its original size.

I would personally just leave my data in the Home account and, provided the 1 TB capacity is enough for both my home and university needs to be saved to the same account, I would save my university work in my Home OneDrive storage in a separate subfolder. I always prefer to control my own cloud storage myself, rather than have an organization do it on my behalf.

Also, if you use the OneDrive app, you will only need to sign in to the app once to access all of your files, both personal and for university. Your workflow will be streamlined and simplified if you only use one OneDrive account for everything, provided it all comfortably fits in 1 TB.

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  • I understand, thank you for the explanation. But I was actually more after saving some money, not doubling a storage space. I know days of simple license numbers are long gone but still it would be nice to be able to apply the new license to the old installation, instead having two licenses to run one Word...
    – Ren
    Commented Oct 23, 2019 at 0:55
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    "... but still it would be nice to be able to apply the new license to the old installation, instead having two licenses to run one Word". If the Office 365 license provided by your university entitles you to install the Office suite, then you could just use that without using your Home version at all. What you want to do sounds a little different from the "merge OneDrive" request in your question. I would just uninstall Office 365 Home and reinstall using the license you get from your university. You could then potentially stop paying for your Home version, once you'd migrated your data.
    – Mr Ethernet
    Commented Oct 23, 2019 at 1:12
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    I didn't ask about merging OneDrive but the licenses. I even found it is somehow possible to use both by signing to the both accounts at the same time, after which I can just switch between them via name selector in upper right corner. Still, to abandon my old license would mean to transfer all my music and other data into school account which I do not want to do, so I guess I'll just keep paying Home license. Thanks for explaining in detail.
    – Ren
    Commented Oct 23, 2019 at 7:47
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Obviously, the best idea in this case is to pay OneDrive only ($2/month) for keeping the private drive and use school license to have access to Office apps. I can't see how this was not apparent to me before.

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  • Glad you found a solution. If you have less than 5 GB of personal data, you could just store it in the free version of OneDrive that you get with an Outlook.com account. It's hard for anyone to make a useful recommendation without knowing how much data you're actually trying to store in the cloud. You also mentioned that you wanted to merge them but now it sounds like you wanted to keep everything separate after all.
    – Mr Ethernet
    Commented Nov 5, 2019 at 13:48
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    Well, I simply didn't want to pay twice for the same product, access to the Office suite. It took me a while to wrap my head around that too, realize that Office and OneDrive are separate, but as I mentioned multiple times, I didn't want to merge data, only licenses. Now I was given another license, by my new employer, which makes it: work, school and private license now, all being paid for the same PC. Not fair, if you ask me. Anyway, with nearly 100GB data in private OneDrive the solution above would work best. Maybe next year. Your help is still very appreciated anyway, thanks for that.
    – Ren
    Commented Nov 6, 2019 at 9:38

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