Office 2019 and Office 2016 are one-off purchases used permanently on one device. Both are installed over the internet. The process is almost identical for the two versions; we point out the differences where they matter.
Which edition did you buy?
The whole procedure depends on it, and the two routes have nothing in common. Our order confirmation says which edition you have:
- Home & Business is a retail licence. The licence key is redeemed once at setup.office.com in a Microsoft account; the download and the activation then run through that account. The next sections describe this route.
- Standard and Professional Plus are volume licences – both of them, not only Professional Plus. They cannot be redeemed at setup.office.com and never appear in a Microsoft account; trying it there ends in an error message. You install from the download link in our email and enter the licence key afterwards from the Command Prompt. For that, skip straight to the section further down that describes the volume licence.
What you need
- The 25-character licence key from your order confirmation.
- A Microsoft account (account.microsoft.com).
- Windows 10 or Windows 11 for Office 2019. Office 2016 also runs on older Windows versions, but no longer receives security updates from Microsoft.
- Around 4 GB of free space and a stable internet connection.
Removing old Office installations
Several Office versions on the same computer do not sit well together. Uninstall older editions beforehand under Settings → Apps → Installed apps. You should also remove any pre-installed trial version of Microsoft 365, because it takes over the file associations.
Step by step to the installation
- Open setup.office.com.
- Sign in with a Microsoft account or create one. The licence is permanently tied to this account.
- Enter the licence key and confirm your country and language.
- Switch to account.microsoft.com and go to Services & subscriptions.
- Click Install next to your Office entry and run the downloaded file.
- Confirm the User Account Control prompt and wait until the installer shows the completion message.
- Start Word, open File → Account and sign in with the same account.
Checking the activation
Under File → Account → Product Information you can see which version is installed and whether it has been activated. With an activated retail licence, the product name appears there without a warning. If the activation is missing, Office will after a short time run only in reduced functionality mode, in which you can read documents but no longer edit them.
Volume licence: a different route
Licence keys for Standard and Professional Plus are volume licences. They cannot be redeemed through setup.office.com and do not appear in the Microsoft account either. Instead, you install Office with the Office Deployment Tool from Microsoft and enter the key locally afterwards. To do this, open the Command Prompt as an administrator:
- Change to the Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office16 folder. Office 2019 and 2016 both use this folder name.
- cscript ospp.vbs /inpkey:YOUR-KEY
- cscript ospp.vbs /act
- cscript ospp.vbs /dstatus then shows the licence status.
If you are unsure which licence type you have: with the retail variant, Office appears in the Microsoft account after being redeemed; with the volume variant, it does not.
If something goes wrong
- The key is rejected on setup.office.com: If it is a volume licence, that is expected behaviour – use the ospp.vbs route instead.
- An error during setup: Remove leftovers from older Office installations with the uninstall support tool that Microsoft provides on its support pages, then restart the computer.
- Office keeps asking you to sign in: Sign out completely under File → Account, restart the computer and sign in again.
- Excel or Word open files in the wrong version: Set the file associations again under Settings → Apps → Default apps.
- Activation fails after a hardware change: After a motherboard swap, Microsoft often treats the device as a new PC. Activating again through the account is then the usual route.
If you have any questions, you can reach us via the contact page. Give your order number, the Office version and the exact error message.