Office 2013 Online Repair requires reactivation

[HCHTech]

I knew I should have called today off because of the snowstorm - ugh.

So, in the field today, Office 2013 Home & Student on a 2-month old HP Win8 laptop - crashes on opening Word, Excel or Powerpoint.

Some history on the machine: $1000 envy i7, already had MB replaced under warranty, when machine was only 2 weeks old.

Publisher was purchased as a standalone, installed after the initial install of Office, also crashing on open.

I ran "quick" repair on Office through control panel, which didn't help. The "online" repair fixed the problem, but neither Office nor Publisher was activated after the repair. Of course, he can't find the license key card for office (and I didn't think to pull the key before the repair) . Try to activate through the Microsoft account, but they only know about Publisher. So Publisher activated ok, but there are no other options on Office. Either he finds his key or buys it again.

Not my fault he lost a 2 month old key card,, but I could have prevented the issue by pulling the key before running the online repair. I don't think running a repair on any of the previous of Office messed with the activation. Live and learn!

 

[Keegan]

I have never heard of an Office 2013 without an account.
So I don't think getting the licence would have helped.
Especially since there is no licence on the pc, only the account.

You could have pulled the activation with something like opa-backup though

Did you check plugins in Office before the repair?

 

[HCHTech]

Yeah, this was a new customer, so who knows WHAT happened before I got there. He said he bought Office with the computer and remembers activating it, but couldn't locate the key card. I saw the original HP invoice (40% off Microsoft Office!), so it looked legit. I couldn't get into any of the programs at all, even with the safe mode option, so I don't know about add-ins.

I don't know - the surprise was that the repair would do anything at all to the activation. Now that I know that's a thing, I'll be more careful and backup the keys before attempting the automated repair in the future.