Installing Office 2016 and Office 2013 apps on the same PC - activation problems - phone activation greyed out

Question

I own a copy of Office 2013 Professional VL and Visio 2016 VL I like O2013 and have no desire to spend yet more money on a useless upgrade to office that adds nothing.

My system running Visio died and I decided to load my Visio 2016 on to the machine I had my Office 2013 When I went to do this the Visio installer up-chucked with an error message that it couldn't load a 64 bit Office application on a PC that had a 32bit Office application already loaded on it.

This was baloney. The Office 2013 version I had loaded was a 64 bit version. So here is what I did to fix the problem:

1) Uninstalled Office 2013
2) Installed Visio 2016
3) Installed Office 2013
4) Ran Visio and entered the PK into the activation query, it activated
5) Ran Word and it asked me "do you want to activate over the Internet" and it had the Telephone activation greyed out. Clicking OK on the Internet activation caused it to fail activation. Closed Word
6) Opened an administrative command line and changed directory to

c:\program files\Microsoft Office\Office15

7) Ran the command:

cscript ospp.vbs /inpkey:[entered the 2013 product key here]

BOOM! Both products are now activated.

I think the problem was that because these are 2 different versions they have different activation databases on the computer but when attempting to activate the older product it was looking at the wrong activation database.

I also think Microsoft's original activation token on the 2013 system was still kicking around buried somewhere in the registry or the computer. Since the PKs did not change and the hardware thumbprint did not change, I did not need to get another activation token

If I HAD needed to get another token I would have followed the inpkey command with

cscript ospp.vbs /dinstid

then called into the telephone activation phone number, given them the installation ID, gotten the token, then entered it with

cscript ospp.vbs /actcid:[token]

This once more really affirms the importance of GETTING and STORING the product keys for any non-subscription Microsoft software that you buy!!!!! Remember, Microsoft has only claimed that they will honor PKs that they have sold - they have NOT committed to actually writing their software products properly so that they will USE those keys much less store them properly!!! If you buy a product from them - like Microsoft Office 2021 Home and Business (which is a one-time buy non-subscription) you may ONLY be given the PK one time - at point of sale - even if you then add it to a subscription list to a Microsoft account, you may not be able to get at it again!!! So make a copy of that key!!! VERY IMPORTANT!!!!

Being a stickler about this saved me $800. Otherwise I would have had to buy a new copy of both office and Visio all over again!!!