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What to do when there’s no phone number to activate Microsoft Office

There’s a bug in the activation process for Microsoft Office from Office 2016 way back to Office 2007 which makes it appear that there’s no telephone option available.

The message “Telephone activation is no longer supported for your product” isn’t true. Phone activation is still available.

Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in fixing the incorrect message or even making sure customer have a complete list of phone numbers that do work.

Activation is the process of verifying your Office product key with Microsoft which send back a code that allows Office to work fully.

“Telephone activation is no longer supported for your product”

If you see this message after installing Office, there’s a few things you can do.

Online activation – the internet connected activation may still work. Phone activation is only needed if the online method doesn’t work.  Wherever possible, use the online system.

Get the activation phone number – go to this undated support page , choose an activation phone number from the pull-down country list, try that number and hope it works (see below).

Phone activation is tedious – you type in the code shown on the activation screen then, if approved, write down the activation code.  Going handsfree or headset is ideal.

If the automatic process doesn’t work, you should be transferred to a human.

 

Clearly Microsoft doesn’t care about properly supporting customers using older versions of Office.  The company would prefer people buy Microsoft 365 so they are letting this activation bug stay in place.

The “Telephone activation is no longer supported for your product” message is probably caused by a failure to connect with some Microsoft server system (that would respond with the latest list of activation phone numbers).  We’re calling this a bug but perhaps it’s more accurate to describe it as a disconnection?  Microsoft could fix their systems to continue working with Office activation but don’t seem prepared to do that.

Incomplete phone list

The most reprehensible part of this bug is Microsoft’s lazy response.  The company can’t even be bothered to check a list of phone numbers for their own branches across the globe.

Before the pull-down list of countries and activation phone numbers is this warning …

“ If a phone number isn’t working, please leave us a comment using the Was this information helpful? section at the bottom of this topic and include the phone number and country/region of the non-working number.”

That means Microsoft can’t even be sure about their own corporate phone numbers necessary to activate one of their own products? Gimme strength!

Surely some Microsoft staffer could be delegated to check with branch offices that the local activation number is right?  Or they could call each number to check themselves?

Instead, Microsoft doesn’t bother and leaves it up to customers to do the checks of their corporate directory for them.  That’s pure laziness and disrespect for paying customers.

Why is Microsoft Office product activation so difficult?

Office Activation Wizard – Scam Tech Support Removal Guide

Fixing Product Activation problems

 

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