We recently purchased 7 machines from Dell and we ordered Office 2016. Our recommendation is to never do this. Dell sells the product without a product key or Activation code. They force you to deal with Microsoft to get it activated. This is an issue because the association is strictly based off of the email address of the purchase. This is an issue because in order to activate the product you have to create a new Microsoft email account and associate the Office with the new email.

You can easily see that Microsoft will have no idea of the association between the purchase and the new email account. We found countless posts over this same issue.

Here is the biggest joke. This is the statement officially from Dell.

Beginning December 16, 2016, if you purchased a Microsoft Office product with your Dell system, you will not receive an Office product key card to activate your product. Instead, you must activate your Office product through your Microsoft Account (MSA). If you do not have an MSA, you will be directed to create one the first time you open any Office application.

As you can see if you don’t have a Microsoft account they want you to create one. Again how does Microsoft know the association between the Dell purchase and the license.

In conclusion, when purchasing a new computer from Dell we would advise to never purchase Microsoft Office from Dell.

Let us know if this helped you…