They require Microsoft account, not an outlook.com address; though that address is an easy way to get the account. It is used for activation/license management, one nice feature is that you can yank a license on a dead device and use it with your new one.

Outside of activation, it is easy to use MS Office for Mac completely offline -- there's a checkbox for that in preferences. You will lose some marginal functionality, some of which I prefer to be disabled (like generating pdfs of your documents server-side instead of client-side).

Nope, a Microsoft account is not enough. It must be an @outlook.com address, or any registered company/school/university address.

It took me almost 3 days to find the problem. Microsoft changed that and between all "answers" there is only one single thread in the Microsoft forums that had the solution.

What does "any registered company/school/university address" mean?

Some years ago, I activated some Office licenses using my company email; we never did any hosting with O365 or whatever was it's predecessor, and at the time, everything went fine. All I had to do was to create live account using that email address.

The error message is along the lines: "You can't sign in here with a personal account. Use your work or school instead".

Which means, that you need to associate your existing account with an @outlook.com address. It seems, that Microsoft changed that requirement somewhere in 2020/2021.

Yes, previously Microsoft account with whatever email address was enough. But they changed that.

I stumbled upon that while upgrading to new hardware, which requires new activation of the Office products.

The same pirated copy of Office 2007 has been doing me fine for well over a decade at this point.

Once again, the paying customer has a worse experience.

The Gaben has spoke: "piracy is more about convenience than price"

We are a small company. I don't use pirated software. I like on-premise software over cloud solutions. Adobe and Zoom ae the only cloud solutions we use. Zoom is obviously. But I look on how to get rid of Adobe, while Adobe Stock has no real competition as the bought Fotolia, which we used before.

Serious question: did you try pexels? for most of my stock photo needs they are okay (not great but okay), and all pictures are public domain and free of charge. They don't have stock video tho. :(

I updated it to version 2010. Much much better. Jack Sparrow ahead:)

Just do it. You won't regret it. I also bought office 2016 cheap at some point in time. That's even better. Faster, nicer UI.. just to give you feedback xD