If this screen appears, Office is installed as a one-year subscription or one-time purchase. A digital product key is transmitted to your PC, so you won't need or receive a printed product key. You activate Office by signing in with a Microsoft account. If we detect your Microsoft account, we'll show it. After installation of Office 365 with corporate credentials, we've started Word 2016 and got a nice screen asking for activation of Office for Mac. Since we already have product bought as corporate client we choose Sign in and follow to next screen.
Hi, As far as I can tell, if we want to activate Office 2016 Preview, we need to have an active Office 365 Business subscription. Please check this thread, it seems that this only applies to some certain plans, such as Office 365 ProPlus, E3, and E4. A wording on the Office 2016 Preview page indicates that preview users need to purchase an Office 365 subscription once the trial period expires to continue using Office 2016. The other option listed on the page is to uninstall the preview to go back to the original version (if one was installed on the PC).
So, I was having this BRUTALLY annoying issue on my macs (when I work from home, I work on my mac) where, every time I launched Outlook 2016, I would be prompted to login with my credentials... Just super annoying and unnecessary.
Theres a ton of documentation on 'how to fix this' but a lot of it misses an important step (also, a facepalm step).
6 Steps total
Step 1: Open the Keychain
Theres a bunch of ways to do it, but ultimately, the easiest way is to press CMD+Space, to open spotlight, then search 'Keychain Access'.
Step 2: Clear old items relating to Exchange/MS login in the keychain
According to a Microsoft Representative, the best option here is:
Make sure you quit Outlook and other Office apps.
Search 'Exchange' under Login --> All Items and delete everything (NOT EVERYTHING - take a look and make sure you're only deleting entries that are in some way related to Microsoft)
Search 'Office' and delete everything
Search 'ADAL' and delete everything
Step 3: Open Outlook & Login
Yea, I know, we're trying to fix this - but you have to log in this ONE more time...
Step 4: Open Outlook Preferences from the menu
Click Outlook -> Preferences in the menu bar
Step 5: Open Accounts
Open the Accounts Section...
Unable To Activate Office 2016 For Mac
Step 6: Finally... Add your password
Seriously - this is critical! Add your password in the password field for the account in question, then close the preferences window.
NOW - when you restart Outlook you SHOULD NOT have to login!
While this isn't the most difficult or pressing issue in the world, it most definitely is annoying! I hope this guide helps some folks!
References
- michaelkummer.com
- Microsoft TechNet Discussion
5 Comments
Office 2016 For Mac Unable To Activate Product
- ChipotleTony Bongiorno Jul 19, 2017 at 06:07pm
Thanks for posting. I've seen this quite a few times from multiple users
- SonoraTMagro Apr 8, 2019 at 07:45pm
Tried and still not working for me. Box will not go away. :(
- Pimientospicehead-pn1ix Jul 16, 2019 at 04:02pm
Thanks for posting, but the login box still appears. A question -- when I searched Exchange, should I delete the Private Exchange Key (two of them) and Public Exchange Key (also two files)?
- Pimientospicehead-xgxh2 Aug 6, 2019 at 06:33am
still not working for me. I have 3 office 365 accounts, and every time I should enter the password 3 times for each account. It is really annoying
- Sonoraearthsound Mar 31, 2020 at 06:22pm
A couple of steps we added to our recipe to workaround this longstanding issue:
- Open Keychain Access > View > Show Invisible Items
- After deleting entries in Keychain related to office, exchange, and adal > restart computer.
- In Keychain > lock the login entry.
- Open Outlook > input password to allow access to Keychain again
- Continue with steps to input password into the password textbox under Tools > Accounts > mailbox(es) having issues
- Restart Outlook