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  • 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?

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  • Even with Office "permanent" licences (and not 365), there are several variants: ESD, PKC, FFP. You should mention which one you have, as transferability rights may vary.
    – OuzoPower
    Commented Oct 1, 2020 at 10:54

3 Answers 3

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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 ;-)

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  • Worked for me just now for Office 2016 Home and Business for Mac.
    – Chad Skeeters
    Commented Aug 1, 2017 at 22:22
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    If your Office is an OEM version that came preinstalled on a workstation, this will most certainly NOT be easy. Microsoft requires a proof of purchase for transfers and they don't have any access to OEM licenses to verify on the back end. So unless you have a copy of the receipt that shows that Office was included with the OEM device, you might be in a very tight spot.
    – Thomas
    Commented Apr 18, 2018 at 0:47
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    As of today, they (both MS support and Office tech support) refused to transfer Office 2016 licence to another account as it is "impossible". They can only transfer subscriptions, not perpetual licences.
    – scrutari
    Commented Oct 16, 2019 at 12:03
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    I can only say you have been very lucky. I just tried to to this, went through three different Microsoft agents and did not get the key removed from my account.
    – Vladimir
    Commented Jan 12, 2020 at 9:54
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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.

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    OK. De-activating it isn't "transferring it to another account". It is funny the different variations you get. I mean logging in to one account, writing down the product key, telling Microsoft to transfer that product key to a different account and logging in to that different account and seeing the original product key.
    – ZiggyStardust
    Commented Sep 14, 2017 at 16:18
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I also had the same issue here. my colleague activated a copy of office 2016 home & business retail version using his personal ms office account on my company owned new pc.

I called the ms office product support, I told him the situation and asked him to transfer the activation to the my company's ms office account. he said he can't do it, because once the key in the retail version of office 2016 is registered, it's bound together with the ms office account forever.

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  • What you describe is a slightly different problem then the problem the author asked about.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 18:58

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