Fix “The Products We Found in Your Account Can’t be Used to Activate” Error Message in Microsoft Office 2013 Applications

Problem Symptom:

If you have installed Microsoft Office 2013 in Windows and you are trying to activate the product using your Windows Live ID (Microsoft account) or Office 365 account credentials, the product doesn’t get activated and you receive following error messages:

It doesn’t matter which Office 2013 program are you trying to activate, you get the same error message in each and every Office 2013 program whether its Word, Excel, Outlook, Project or Visio.

Cause:

This error message comes when you already have a testing version of Office 2013 such as Customer Preview version (which was released by Microsoft free to public) installed in your system and then you try to install the final RTM version of Office 2013. Even if you uninstall the preview version successfully, its product key and other license details still reside in your Windows which cause a license mismatch problem and Office 2013 shows this error message and doesn’t activate itself.

Solution 1:

Now the question occurs what to do? How to fix this problem? The fix is very simple. Don’t activate the product using your account credentials. Just enter your product key manually to activate Office 2013 copy.

You can follow these simple steps to fix the problem and successfully activate Office 2013 in your system:

1. Open Control Panel and click on Programs and Features icon.

2. Now click on Microsoft Office 2013 entry given in the list and then click on Change button given in the toolbar.

3. It’ll open Office 2013 setup wizard and will show following options to select:

• Add or Remove Features
• Repair
• Remove
• Enter a Product Key

4. Select “Enter a Product Key” option and click on Continue button.

5. Now type your 25-characters product key and click on Continue button.

It’ll take a few moments and will successfully activate your Office 2013 copy without any problem.

Solution 2:

If the above mentioned method doesn’t work for you, you’ll need to do some extra work to fix the problem. You’ll need to manually uninstall product keys installed by Preview version of Office 2013 and after that you’ll be able to activate the product in your system.

Follow these simple steps to remove existing product keys of Office 2013 from your Windows:

1. Open Command Prompt as Administrator and type following command:

If Windows is installed in any other drive in your computer, replace C: with the appropriate drive letter in the above command.

2. It’ll activate Office 2013 program folder. Now type following command:

It’ll take a few moments and will show some information related to Office 2013 license.

3. Note down the last 5 characters of product keys given in each section.

4. Now run following command for each product key:

For example if the last 5 characters of one product key are ABCDE, then run following command:

5. Run above command for all given product keys.

6. At the end uninstall all existing versions of Office from your system and then reinstall Office 2013. Now it should activate itself without any problem.