Unable to log out from old school account and use my personal lifetime license

Question

I recently purchased a lifetime license named "Office Home & Business 2021 for Mac". OneNote was included in the installation associated with this license, meaning my license should provide access to OneNote.

All Microsoft products on my computer was previously signed into my school account including OneNote. When I open OneNote, my school account is not signed in technically (only my personal account appears in the window where you select which account to use). However, all notes from school account remain and are available for edits after I signed back into the school account that I am not longer using. I was unable sign out of it because it doesn't show in the window for account selection, nor was I able to use OneNote with my personal account even though OneNote is detecting it.

I would need further help on this. Please help. Thank you.

Screenshot attached for better illustration:

Answer 1

Hi @Gerald

Thank you for taking the time to give me feedback and share your experience.

I am glad that you find the key to your issue.

It's weird that I need to sign out from PowerPoint to prompt the sign-out on OneNote, and also weird that only PowerPoint was signed into my university account but not Word, Excel, Teams, or Outlook.

It's a bit strange indeed. Normally when you log in or out of an account in one Office application, this action is synchronized in other Office applications.

Currently, if you activate and use Office 2021 normally, you can ignore the above minor situation and continue to use Office 2021.

By the way, since the Microsoft Q&A community has a policy that "The question author cannot accept their own answer. They can only accept answers by others.", and according to the scenario introduced here: Answering your own questions on Microsoft Q&A, I would make a brief summary of this thread:

Issue Symptom:

Unable to log out from old school account and use personal lifetime license for Office Home & Business 2021 for Mac.

The notebooks from old school account remain in OneNote and are available for edits after signing back into the school account that was no longer used, OneNote cannot be used with another personal account even though the personal account is detected.

Current Status:

Resolved by Gerald.

1. Check other Microsoft 365 apps, such as PowerPoint to see if any are signed in with the old university account. And then sign out this account.
2. Immediately after, OneNote prompted that notebooks from school account would be deleted.
3. Confirmed it and signed in with personal account.
4. Everything is working fine now.

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Answer 2

Hi @Gerald

I suggest you close and quit all Office apps.

Go to the Finder> Applications> Utilities> Keychain Access> Remove the Identities related to Microsoft Office.

Then download and run the license removal tool.

Reopen OneNote, sign your personal Microsoft account for a check.

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