Cannot activate Office Apps with High Sierra

Can’t tell for sure as I don’t know what authentication services that Office version uses… would need to test it on my end to check whether the hack even would work for that version. In the meantime, I highly suggest you download and install the 2019 version of Office if you can. I have shared the Microsoft Office for Mac downloads link in the Gist. Here it is if you’d like to try that alternative: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/update-history-office-for-mac (according to some other posts online, it seems like version 16.43 and earlier would work with High Sierra)

Thank you for the updated details. I've followed them to the letter for trying to activate Office 2016, and I can only assume it likely doesn't work for this release. :(

Are you able to look into what might be different in this case?

Thanks for the encouragement -- it prompted me to have another go at it this morning and your tips about which mitmproxy to install helped a lot! I was able to get one that worked, with the tool showing "flows" (not sure what that means, but that's fine lol) in the terminal as you described. I was even then able to install the CA certificate, and everything looked exactly like your screenshots (except in English not Portuguese), which was reassuring and very satisfying (made it feel like my work yesterday paid off). Then I got to #8 of your steps, the part where you need to "Select one Office App that you wish to authenticate under and start the App".

Magically (I don't know how else to explain it), this time, when I opened Microsoft Word, it did not prompt me to sign in or activate, as it has been all week since this fiasco began! I suddenly could now edit and save, re-open with my edits saved no problem. I tried Excel as well (the other Office App I use daily) and it also seems to be working a-okay.

The only possible explanation I have is that I did another Restart last night as I was dealing with an external hard drive issue. I was at the point of saving my Desktop items to an external hard drive thinking it was final days. While I HAD done Restarts earlier this week (in fact, the restart I did last Friday forced me to enter my account details and then brought me to the blank screen), this time might have been different? I was effectively and successfully all the way to #8 of your steps when this happened, so maybe it was a combination of the restart and the correct mitmproxy download, I'm not sure. Seems like E.M.W. in an earlier post (Nov 2nd) had something like this happen.

Anyway, my MacOS Sierra version 10.12.6 is now running my Office 2019 apps seemingly as before.Fingers crossed it lasts. I have saved all your steps in case it happens again.

Thanks so much. This was my first time turning for computer help to a thread like this one, and I am blown away by the generosity of people like you.

I thank all of you, including the Microsoft reps who risked their jobs for telling the truth, for the posts here confirming what it took me two afternoons of wasted time to find out: that Microsoft has conned countless users who still have older Macintoshes running Mac OS X 10.13 High Sierra.

The firm fails to make it clear that 365 will not work with this version of OS X. I wonder how much the banks and card companies have made processing cancelled 365 accounts. As a journalist and writer, I dislike web-based programmes.

I am currently posting this on a recent MacBook and am disgusted that I cannot use my old MacBooks with the Office 2016 that I bought in 2018 and which cannot be reactivated because of the 'Blank Screen Scandal'.

Well, it's not a scandal, is it? It's just a load of malcontents like us shouting into a void. But this will cost Microsoft in the long long. And Apple. The two firms have become similar in terms of the contempt they clearly have for customers.

Time was when when someone with my media background could get them to behave better but they know that there is little or nothing any of us can do short of violence against their decision-makers which is of course out of the question as we are civilised.

Hello Bateman,

I think you’re nearly there to get mitmproxy going. Firstly, I don’t recommend you trying to use Homebrew to install mitmproxy due to lack of support for older macos releases. Secondly, please attempt to download it from their downloads page as stated in the steps: https://mitmproxy.org/downloads/

Thirdly, from looking at the Terminal output you shared, it seems like the version you installed failed to run because it’s been built for a CPU architecture different from your computer’s. Notice that for Mac they release two binaries, one for arm64-based cpus and another for x86/64-based cpus. If your Mac runs on an Intel CPU for instance, download and install the x86/64 release for the mitmproxy version you’re installing. The end result should be a Terminal window similar to the ones shown in the mitmproxy tool landing page. Hope this helps!