Cannot activate Office Apps with High Sierra

Rafael!

Thank you very much for taking the time and trouble to explain this. I intend to try your process out as soon as I feel brave enough. The Microsoft people were friendly and helpful, it must be said, but this is a fairly major systemic oversight! Too many of their technical designers probably don’t understand that many of us use obsolete operating systems and hardware.

Best wishes for 2024.

Hi Rafael,
You are an absolute legend, a thousand thanks for this guide. I was able to do it successfully on 2 old High Sierra iMacs.

It took me 1-2 minutes to understand what exactly did what in mitmproxy but after that it was a breeze.

Can't thank you enough

wish you all a happy new year

Best Regards

Lukas

Hi Rafael, very helpful of you. I am away for a month from the location where my High Sierra iMac is located so I don't think I will be able to try remotely but I will definitely try it when I return, in the meantime I have my Macbook (M1 - Sonoma 14.7.2) with me not sure if I could try on it or a friend has an older Macbook (Monterey 12.7.6). I will give it a go in the next 3-4 days. Best wishes for the festive season and for a happy and prosperous New Year. Jean-Luc

I just updated the gist once more, with a WIP version of an alternate method that trades off most of the fiddling with mitmproxy for some automated steps, assuming that you can run some simple MacOS Terminal commands. It basically uses a mitmproxy addon to help you with the workaround. I'll come back to it later to add some details:

https://gist.github.com/rafaelfonte/56b9fb80daed8c586433e82859ccb876#alternate-method---mitmproxy-addon-wip

It assumes that you have Firefox installed to get the URL you should browse to quickly, but even without it you should be able to use it. The main benefit from it is that it does the auth login redirect automatically for you once you have the Auth code URL at hand - whereas in the original method you are required to apply the changes manually and within a time limit, which can be challenging.

Hi RATLSNAKE,

I tried following these steps on the 2016 version of Office. Here is what I found:

• I installed Office Word 2016 15.11 (got it from an update page from MS). When trying to activate it, it gave me a "Network Connectivity error". I couldn't see any flows in the mitmproxy tool after enabling the proxy setting. I think think for older versions of Office 2016 we won't get any luck
• In then found a 32-bit installer for Office 2016, from MS as well. This installed Office 15.25 with all applications (Outlook is installed also but it can't run due to some incompatibility issue). I then tried to follow the same steps re. capturing the authentication URL, getting an activation code URL and then trying to redirect it again. The good news is: it worked, with the exact same steps!

If you'd like to try it as well, this is where I got the installer from (look at the download link under the 32-bit installation reversion section):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/office-for-mac/office-2016-for-mac-64-bit-upgrade#options-for-reverting-to-32-bit-installations

Hopefully this version of Office will work on your machine - if it does, you should be able to follow the same guide to get it to work.

If you'd like to check the version of Office you're running, click the "About" option.