troubleshooting installation of Excel, Word, and other Microsoft Office applications
troubleshooting installation of Excel, Word, and other Microsoft Office applications
I recently encountered an issue where I accidentally disabled my windows installation while trying to free up hardware-reserved RAM. After the clean install, I lost all apps on my boot drive and now rely on Excel. While attempting to set up Excel via the Microsoft 365 app, it prompts for a premium subscription even though I already had Office Home and Student. When entering my product key, it displays "token not found." Before performing a clean install, my laptop displayed the default name LAPTOP- xxxxxxxx on Microsoft’s devices page. Now it shows DESKTOP- xxxxxxx, possibly linked to that name. Someone could help resolve this? I’m unsure if this is relevant, but I remember booting into Windows installation from a USB during a previous clean install—so I thought the OS didn’t actually install Windows. I also installed Windows three times on the same drive before formatting the SSD and doing the clean install. I might need to revisit this thread later. Thank you in advance for your help!
You access your office account via a web browser and add local applications from there.
Office365 isn't included with any kind of pay-per-use license. The MS Office version you installed wasn't the one you had. If you haven't backed up your key yet, it's likely you're out of options, since other Office versions don't store activation codes in the cloud.
While browsing on Microsoft's site for app installation issues, it mentioned that once you log into the office portal using your Microsoft account, your office and Microsoft account would connect automatically. This would let you download apps whenever needed. I believe this is related to the device name being associated with your Microsoft account being updated.
Does this match the account your key was linked to? If not, locate the correct registration. If it aligns with your account, you might need to cancel and renew. Support from Microsoft would likely be more effective now, though you could wait in a hold period.
You don’t possess the required MS365 licenses for this account. If you did, it should have provided an installer. That detail isn’t important since MS365 operates as a subscription with constant access controls. This likely points to an incorrect account or a mismatch between your license and Office 365.
This suggests it likely had a small total number of installations—it might have been designed for one use only. You're now ready to contact MS support. In the past, I've received free items simply by staying patient and not giving up.