Microsoft 365 Family Sharing not working

My husband has 365 Family, which he converted to a year ago from his 365 Personal. I have had 365 Personal for years. When he converted to Family, he sent me invitations and links to Share it with me. It's been a year now, with countless attempts, and Share never works. "Customer service" has been useless: They have no clue how to help. We have cleared the caches, even now let my Personal subscription expire yesterday, so I have no Personal, yet I still can't get the Share links to open. Oh, yes, duh, we have a fine internet connection, always. With no Personal account I can't get my email for my business. This is like bait and switch: Urge my husband to Share hundreds of times, but never allow the Share to happen and now requiring, it appears, that I keep my Personal account or else. I know an engineer at Microsoft and he is appalled by this. So, now, I am going to resubscribe to my Personal account because Microsoft won't allow the Share and we've already spent 20 hours messing with it. Bait and switch. Cheating me out of $70 a year when you say I can Share in a Family subscription but you won't allow it. PS: My husband is more than capable of handling online issues and software, for he's been at it for 30+ years. It isn't us -- it's Microsoft. Something is wrong, and your instructions don't address it.

I had a similar problem and I eventually got it working when I went back to the MS account that shared the invite - I had to go to the family members section and accept the request to join the family group, and then the office 365 install worked for me.

But it's absolutely ridiculous that there is no mention of this extra step as a requirement in the guides.

DO BETTER, MS!!!

Here is what worked for me. For the people with an existing Microsoft account, BEFORE you try and accept the invitation from the person inviting you to their subscription, login to:

https://account.microsoft.com/family/home

If you have the ability on the home page to "Add Family Member", then you are already the Organizer of your own family. I believe this is what is preventing you from properly accepting the email invite.

Here is what I did:

Click on the 3 vertical dots next to "YOU".

You should see "Leave this Family" or something similar (sorry I don't remember exactly what it said). Essentially you are leaving your own "family".

Click confirm on the pop-ups you receive.

Then logout of your account and close out your browser completely.

Go to the email invite you received to join the family group and click on "Accept Invitation".

It should take you to the Microsoft 365 account login page and once logged in, you should see your view change. You should no longer have the ability to "Add a Family Member" and under where it says "Your Family", you should now see Premium Subscriber and it should show the person who invited you in "Your Family" as the Family Organizer.

From there, I just opened the desktop Word app and received a pop-up to accept the subscription.

I hope this helps

Hi Fatima,

How do you suggest "contacting Microsoft Support for further assistance"?

The phone number I found only says to go online to "help.microsoft.com"

I just shared my Microsoft365 with a family member through an email invitation. It is asking her for my product key. I have read on the Instructions for sharing, that the product key is not required in order to share. She and I have been sharing our 365 account for years and now it's not working any more. I paid for it this year but it's the original account. I don't have the product key any more.

I also saw on the "help page" that there were 55 people that had the same question as I do, and another time I saw there were 36 people with the same question...and no answers...only "it should work."

Do you know of anyone who will actually answer a phone in customer service?

thank you for your time,

Kathy

What happened here? Someone contacted me at Microsoft. They politely help me go through some checks. Nothing changed. They then said someone would follow up. I then found the issue was resolved. I need help here. I still cant share a Microsoft 365 Family Subscription. case no. ***