How to Remove and Re-Add Office 2013/2016 License Key on Office 365

This was an interesting issue that came in and one scenario that our tech team was working on where they did not notice many resolutions for this issue. The steps below helped in resolving all licensing issues for the client. We know a lot of issues like this do occur, and we think this blog will help you all big time.

Scenario

I was working on a project that previously was using Office 365 with the Office Pro Plus subscription feature. We started to notice that when we removed the license for the Office 365 Pro Plus and assigned the newly adopted Office Business Premium License that the Outlook clients would get the below error message.

We tried to sign in with the new account, but we would still run into the same issue. We tried to fully uninstall the Office client and reinstall but that did not resolve the issue. We also used the Support and Recover Assistant but that also did not resolve the issue.

Solution

The trouble was I could not figure out how to remove the existing software license to the user and have the Outlook client only recognize the new license. Finally, I have found steps that will accomplish this without having to repair/reinstall office.

1. Open a Command Prompt window, and then take one of the following actions

• If you installed the 64-bit version of Office 2016, move to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16
• If you installed the 32-bit version of Office 2016, move to the following folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16

2. Display the Current License(s)

• Type the following command to display the license status. In this case some users had three different licenses assigned to them Note the last five characters of any and all license keys that display in the output: cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus

3. Remove the License(s)

• Now run the following command as many times as needed to remove all of the license keys you noted from the previous step: cscript ospp.vbs /unpkey:<last five characters of product key>

4. Restart the Computer

• Once the remove commands are successful, close the command prompt and restart the PC.

5. Reactivate MS Office 2016 with New Account

• Launch one of the MS Office 2016 applications (I like to use Word). The application should prompt you to reactivate the by providing your sign-on ID. Enter in the new user’s credentials and the software will now be licensed under their ID.

The steps above also do not require any modifications to the registry which can also harm the computer that you are working on.