How to transfer office activation to another account?

Question

• 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.

Comments

[OuzoPower]

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.

[Chad Skeeters]

Worked for me just now for Office 2016 Home and Business for Mac.

[Ramhound]

What you describe is a slightly different problem then the problem the author asked about.

[ZiggyStardust]

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.

[Thomas]

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.

[scrutari]

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.

[Vladimir]

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.