How am I supposed to activate Office 2013 now?
Yes, I’m a Linux user. No, I’m not doing everything in LibreOffice. I still keep Excel 2013 around because it’s the least painful way to run certain macro-heavy spreadsheets (and yes, that includes stupid little “grinding” trackers for games like EVE Online). So Microsoft quietly kneecapping phone activation is… annoying.
This popped up via Neowin (by way of Hacker News): if you try to activate Windows by phone, the automated line now redirects you to an online portal and tells you, essentially, “activation has moved online” at aka.ms/aoh.
And it’s not just Windows-adjacent weirdness. Microsoft has also had “telephone activation is no longer supported” errors for some non-subscription Office installs, with workarounds that amount to “do it another way.”
Microsoft Support
The message itself is beautifully on-brand:
“Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh.” — Computer Phone Lady [If you get it, your knees probably click when you stand up.]
Yes, “Computer Phone Lady” is a reference. If you get it, your back probably also hurts. Anyway: welcome to the slow death of phone activation.
If you’re stuck dealing with this, the least painful approach is to treat your setup like any other legacy toolchain: isolate it, stabilize it, and stop letting it touch the rest of your life.
If you already have a working/activated install, do the boring sysadmin thing: put it in an isolated VM, lock it down, and keep a known-good snapshot you can restore. No drama, no heroics. Just containment and backups.
If you can’t activate because the old flows are being retired, then you’ve basically got three options:
- Move to a supported perpetual licence (not a subscription) and call it the cost of doing business.
- Port the workflow: replace the macro with something that doesn’t depend on Microsoft’s activation roulette (LibreOffice + rewrite, or a small script that generates the same outputs).
- Keep the Windows box as a tool, not a lifestyle: one VM for that one task, minimal network access, and no pretending it’s a daily driver.
What I’m not interested in doing is paying rent on software I already bought because some product manager discovered recurring revenue. I don’t need “Office 365.” I need Excel for a few macros and Word for the occasional letterhead. That’s it.
Can we go back to owning software? Apparently not. So the next-best thing is acting like we own it: isolate it, preserve it, and refuse to rebuild our lives around someone else’s service roadmap.