Have new Computer w/Windows 10 Pro. Purchased new MS Office Professional 2021. Will not activate.

Question

Have purchased from Dell two new computers and two new instances of MS Office Professional 2021 (ProPlus2021Retail.img) which I have downloaded and attempted to activate.

We are a 501(C)(3) Non-Profit and currently have MS 365 which was obtained some years ago which is used by staff members of our organization. This has worked well for us and integrated well with our earlier versions of MS Office Professional.

When the new computers which run Windows 10 Professional were installed, we, after much effort, have been unable to migrate MS Office Professional 2016. For this reason, we purchased new instances of MS Office Professional 2021.

When we attempted to install the first instance of MS Office Professional 2021 on the first new computer it would not allow us to activate or link with our corporate version of MS 365 and also would not allow us to set it up under the computer staff person's name. Since I, as Executive Director had purchased the new software and computer for the organization, it insisted on setting it up under my email. When we attempted to activate MS Office Professional 2021 for this computer it gave us the following error:

To finish redeeming this product key on the web, select Next.
Error PIN-INAPP-UNKNOWN-9

No next button presented itself and the only option allowed was to go online to register it. When we attempted to use the employee’s email that was using the computer it would not recognize their email. Would only recognize my email. When I attempted to log into our organizational 365 account it said the user-name and password were not found. It then required me to set up a new instance of MS 365 which is not connected to the corporate 365.

Spent over 4 hours online with Dell technical support and never got an answer or a work-around. Was referred to Microsoft and after being put in Que for 22 hours (first instance) 27 hours (second instance) and not being able to get in cue after that, have left it for now. This, however, still needs to be corrected.

When attempting to install MS Office Professional on the 2nd brand new computer from Dell which also would not let me migrate our old MS Office Professional 2016, we ran into the same error code and the same difficulties as listed above.

Please note that I am still able to open the Chrome browser and log into the corporate MS 365 as we did before all of this and access all of our organizational data. In addition, other staff are able to log into the Corporate MS 365 too, and all instances of MS Office Professional 2016 that remain active are connecting without trouble to the Corporate MS 365 for use of Outlook, etc.

Incidentally, when I open MS Office Professional 2021 Outlook, which is set to mostly shut down January 4, and look in Account Settings / Email Accounts it shows my email under Name and under Type it says "Microsoft Exchange (send from this account by default)" and is obviously connected to / interfacing with the MS 365 corporate account ... but still won't activate.!!!???

On the two new computers, we, at the Dell technician's direction and with their help as we granted them access to our computers, have installed, then uninstalled and reinstalled the MS Office Professional 2021 and still run into the same problem.

It appears that somehow the apparently new system at Microsoft is not recognizing something or the Dell Technicians and I are not following some important step that will allow for activation.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Hi @Greg Martin ,
I suggest you check the status of Office license in PC, please follow these steps:
Search CMD, right-click the Command Prompt and run as administrator. Then copy and paste the command, click Enter at last:
cscript.exe "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office16\ospp.vbs" /dstatus
If you are running 32-bit Office on a 64-bit operating system:
cscript.exe "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Office\Office16\ospp.vbs" /dstatus

If you can find the Office 365 product key in list, try to remove it by typing the following command with the Last 5 characters of installed product key (I replace it with XXXXX, but what you type in is what you see on your computer) in this interface:
cscript.exe "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office16\ospp.vbs" /unpkey:XXXXX
If the 32bit version of Office installed on a 64bit operation, run the following command:
cscript.exe "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Office\Office16\ospp.vbs" /unpkey:XXXXX

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Answer 2

Did you ever get this resolved? I have nearly the same issue.