Authentication mixup between personal and work account

Question

Authentication mixup between personal and work account

Claus Eksing 0

Same email i used for bort a personal and work purpose. This seems to be a problem when used both with a MS personal account as well as a work account.

I have a newly purchased Office 365 license for personal use and installed the all Office 365 application on my mac computer. After installing Office products on my mac i am asked to enter credential for my microsoft account when i for instance tries to open the Word application.

At this point i enter my email and is only offered to login with my work account which is a problem, because the Office 365 license is registred with my personal account.

So my questions are:

Why am i not offered to login to my personal microsoft account when i am opening one of my installed Office 365 applications on my mac computer ?
How do I get around this issues, so I can start to use my brand new Office 365 license ?

Claus Eksing 0 Reputation points

2024-01-09T07:49:45.4766667+00:00

I have once again uninstalled all Office 365 software from my Mac computer, removed all licenses with the license removal tool.
Downloade a fresh Office 365 installer from the http://account.microsoft.com where I have signed in with my "personal" account.
Installed a fresh Office 365 package.

When I try to open any of the Office 365 software applications - for instance Excel - I am asked to verify my account, so I type in my account name and password.

Next thing is that the account vefication app on my computer ask me to verify a 2 digit code in the Authenticator app on my phone device. However the Authenticator app is silent and I am not able to complet the sign in process.

Doing the sign in procedure I am asked whether I want to use "work" or "personal" account login as for instance I am asked all the time when logging into the microsoft account on the web. The result is that I can not use Office 365 that I have purchased on my Mac as promised.

I am beginning to feel, that I have purchased a broken software package and it is getting to point where it is pretty annoying.

If anyone at Microsoft can help me solve this problem I really appreciate it ?

2 answers

Your answer

Claus Eksing 0 Reputation points

2024-01-09T07:49:45.4766667+00:00

I have once again uninstalled all Office 365 software from my Mac computer, removed all licenses with the license removal tool.
Downloade a fresh Office 365 installer from the http://account.microsoft.com where I have signed in with my "personal" account.
Installed a fresh Office 365 package.

When I try to open any of the Office 365 software applications - for instance Excel - I am asked to verify my account, so I type in my account name and password.

Next thing is that the account vefication app on my computer ask me to verify a 2 digit code in the Authenticator app on my phone device. However the Authenticator app is silent and I am not able to complet the sign in process.

Doing the sign in procedure I am asked whether I want to use "work" or "personal" account login as for instance I am asked all the time when logging into the microsoft account on the web. The result is that I can not use Office 365 that I have purchased on my Mac as promised.

I am beginning to feel, that I have purchased a broken software package and it is getting to point where it is pretty annoying.

If anyone at Microsoft can help me solve this problem I really appreciate it ?

Answer 1

John Korchok 6,416 Volunteer Moderator

Microsoft uses your email address as the index for your account. You can't have both a personal and a work account that use the same address. To have 2 different installations of Microsoft 365, you would have to have 2 different email addresses.

Answer 2

Jiajing Hua 18,065 Moderator

Hi @Claus Eksing

Are the subscriptions for personal and work are same?

If yes, for a better user experience, please refer John Korchok's suggestion, it's best to use different email addresses to bound different licenses of Microsoft 365.
If they are different subscriptions, for personal one is Microsoft 365 Personal or other personal Microsoft 365 subscription, please check whether you can sign your account in https://account.microsoft.com/?refd=account.microsoft.com. Then you may try to install Office apps for Mac from this webpage.

(To remove Office license files on a Mac, please refer to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/how-to-remove-office-license-files-on-a-mac-b032c0f6-a431-4dad-83a9-6b727c03b193)

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Claus Eksing 0 Reputation points

2023-12-28T08:31:42.95+00:00
Hi @Jiajing Hua

Thank you for your help so far.

Point taken for a better experience when having separate mails for personal and work accounts. However i has been working reasonably fine in the past. I will adapt to your recommendation.

Regarding my subscription for Microsoft 365 it is a personal subscription. I have now

Removed all installed office app and also removed all licenses as you suggest

Signed into my personal microsoft account.

Installed Office apps from the web page as you suggest.

When staring any of the Office apps I am asked to sign in to my personal account and get to the point where I asked to enter a what seems to be a 6 digit code shown in my Authenticator app.
This is where i goes wrong, because no code appears in the Authenticator.

I therefore suspect that there still is a personal / work account registration issue linked to the Authenticator app. I don't know how to work around it to fix it.
Do you have a take on that thought and can you guide me on what to do ?

Your help is much appreciated and thanks for your previous reply.
Jiajing Hua 18,065 Reputation points Moderator

2023-12-29T05:15:46.68+00:00

Hi @Claus Eksing

Thanks for your back.

When staring any of the Office apps I am asked to sign in to my personal account and get to the point where I asked to enter a what seems to be a 6 digit code shown in my Authenticator app.

For your work account, the Authenticator app is set as an additional security verification method. Even installing Office from your personal account webpage, you still need verification.

Since I can't replicate your situation, I have no such relevant experience. If it still does not work, and if the condition permits, can the Authenticator app verification be deleted temporarily? Of course, this operation theoretically increases account security risks.

Thanks for your understanding.
Claus Eksing 0 Reputation points

2023-12-29T08:28:51.07+00:00

Hi @Jiajing Hua

To disable Authenticator app verfication for the work account, i need to login to the https://account.microsoft.com/?refd=account.microsoft.com site with my work account.

I guess that Login to the account site with my "work" account requies that the Authentication app is capable of capture the "push" notifications send from the security system of the account site.

With a "broken" security configuration. The account site i probably trying to send push notifications to the Authentication app on my device, but fails to complete this process and the result is a failed login attempt.

I have now also removed the "work" account registration in my Authenticator app in attempt to reset the "work" account registration. Well this has not made my life easier since I don't know how to reinitialize the "work" account registration in the Authenticator app on my mobile device.

Regarding the intial login to the Office 365 with newly installed software. The Office 365 applications like "Word", "Excel" etc. only offers me to login to my "work" account unlike the login sequence to my account on the web where I am offerede to select either "personal" or "work" account.
So again Office 365 most likely tries to push authentication messages to my Authentication app that fails and i again suspect that theses authentications push messages is send to my broken "work" account registration on Authenticator app.

Therefore complete deadlock.

When it all fails Office 365 offers me to enable "flagging" and then ask me to reproduce the problem. Here I then given a "Request Id" and a "Correlation Id".

Would that be of any help if I send that information to you or someone else at Microsoft ?

Maybe someone could look into why the Office 365 applications only offers me to select "work" account login ?

My guess is that could I from any of the Office 365 applications select login with "personal" account then it would work.
Guavity 170 Reputation points

2023-12-29T14:34:57.1866667+00:00

It looks like an issue with the authentication device. Can you change the authentication method before logging in?
Claus Eksing 0 Reputation points

2023-12-29T14:43:19.1566667+00:00

Hi @Guavity

I am not completely sure what you mean, but if you are asking me if I can change authentication method on my Mac computer when I am opening one of the Office 365 applications ?

Then the answer is no - Only "work" account login is available.

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Authentication mixup between personal and work account

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