Office 2016 "self-updating" to Office 365?

[britechguy]

I have Office 2016 installed on multiple systems in my household. Yesterday, my partner started complaining about MS-Word not behaving as it had been when trying to save files that had not previously been saved. Upon further exploration, I see that when he fires up Word it's showing a Word 365 splash screen.

He is not the sort of user who's sophisticated enough to have made this update intentionally, and I have no idea how it would have occurred. I am wondering if anyone else has experienced this over the last two weeks, probably this past week alone?

 

[Digerati]

That is odd. I also have Office 2016 (Office Home and Business 2016). I just checked Word, Excel and Outlook and none have reverted to the Office 365 versions. So I don't know what might have happened there. I also looked through the Word menus and don't see anything about migrating to 365 there either. Since 365 is an annual subscription program, you might need to call MS on this.

If you figure this out, please let us know what happened and hopefully, how you got back to the regular Word.

 

[Sysnative Windows Update]

All good here. Word 2016 still working as intended.

 

[britechguy]

Well, I decided I was not even going to try to figure out how what had come to pass actually came to pass. One thing that my partner does not seem to understand is that without some sequence of events leading up to something it's almost impossible to determine exactly what happened.

I first tried just uninstalling Office 365, which was shown in Programs & Features alongside Office 2016. After uninstalling and restarting the system, when one invoked Word via the desktop shortcut the splash screen for Word under Office 365 still appeared. At that point I uninstalled Office 2016 as well.

Then downloaded Office 2016 via setup.office.com using the original product key and reinstalled it. We're back to normal. Heaven knows how long it will last, but this time it looks like the license key is now associated with his Microsoft account, and it had not been before.

Essentially a "nuke it and start all over again" fix. I hate those, but sometimes expediency wins out.

 

[Digerati]

Essentially a "nuke it and start all over again" fix. I hate those, but sometimes expediency wins out.

I hate them too because (1) often it does not work, and (2) typically, nothing is learned to prevent recurrence of the problem. In any case, I am glad you got it sorted out and thank for the follow-up.