Solved After Windows 11 Upgrade Office Suite Activation Issues

After upgrading my wife's PC to Win 11 from Win 10 via Windows Update, her Office 2019 Home and Business asked for activation again, but would throw up an error saying the key was already in use. After searching, I see many people having this problem with the Office Suites installed by iso or the installer. I don't think you'll have this problem with 365, as it's online. Repairing will not work, activating by phone will not work either. Skip all the regedits and all the other bull you find and do this:
Completely uninstall your Office suite.
Then go to this site and log in with your Microsoft credentials that you were using the suite with before: https://account.microsoft.com/
Then go to this site and enter your activation key: Sign in to your account
Download and reinstall=profit!

Worked first time for me.

I have both Office 2019 Pro Plus and Office 2021 Pro Plus. I used two different Microsoft sites to login and download each one.

The site I went to login and download Office 2021 was as you said https://account.microsoft.com/



However the site I went to login and download Office 2019 was Setup Office or Microsoft 365

That's correct. 2021, 2019, and 2016 bring you to different looking sites to download depending on year of the key, but all of them work. My new 2021 Pro Plus key brought me here:
I'm not sure why the keys already in use by you don't correctly attach to your account after the upgrade. My wife was using hers for a few years and she was logged in the whole time. It didn't show in her account before I uninstalled it. I guess it released the key when I did, then I added it to her account via the website and it re-attached and was able to re-install and activate. Microsoft bug.

FreakyFrankz said:

That's correct. 2021, 2019, and 2016 bring you to different looking sites to download depending on year of the key, but all of them work. My new 2021 Pro Plus key brought me here:View attachment 58655
I'm not sure why the keys already in use by you don't correctly attach to your account after the upgrade. My wife was using hers for a few years and she was logged in the whole time. It didn't show in her account before I uninstalled it. I guess it released the key when I did, then I added it to her account via the website and it re-attached and was able to re-install and activate. Microsoft bug.

Click to expand...

Since I was buying a new laptop I uninstalled Office 2019 Pro Plus on my old laptop.

When I tried to install Office 2019 Pro Plus on my new laptop it wouldn't activate it with the old key. I didn't have time to worry about that so I bought Office 2021 Pro Plus for my new laptop. It activated fine.

I reinstalled Office 2019 Pro Plus on my old laptop. It activated again with the old key.

I am not sure why I couldn't activate Office 2019 Pro Plus on my new laptop. Maybe if I had waited long enough the old activation would have been released by the activation server. I guess I will never know for sure.

BTW, has your wife ever had Word 2019 freeze for maybe 20-30 seconds. Word worked OK until it did it again maybe a week later. Word 2021 does that also but not as often.

Did you try the "Activate by phone" option when the window popped up? It usually works after uninstalling from the old PC, but only a few times.
As for the freezing, I would try the "Repair Online" method by going into Apps in Settings and selecting repair from the options. I've seen Word turn milky and freeze before and the repair method took care of it. Sometimes, a converted document will cause it.

FreakyFrankz said:

Did you try the "Activate by phone" option when the window popped up? It usually works after uninstalling from the old PC, but only a few times.
As for the freezing, I would try the "Repair Online" method by going into Apps in Settings and selecting repair from the options. I've seen Word turn milky and freeze before and the repair method took care of it. Sometimes, a converted document will cause it.

Click to expand...

I could have tried activate by phone but because of the freezing problem I used it as an excuse to buy Office 2021. I am not sorry I did that. I have two copies of Office 2919 and one of Office 2021. Word freezes occasionally in all of them. One time I tried a repair in one of the copies of Office 2019. It made no difference in the freezing problem.

The "repair online" does a fresh install. Mysterious. None of the other programs freeze, such as Excel, PowerPoint, etc.?