Tip: Extend Your Office 365 Home Subscription with a New Office 365 Personal Subscription

If you already have an Office 365 Home subscription and receive an Office 365 Personal subscription with a new PC or other device, you can now convert that Personal subscription to 9 additional months for your Home subscription. This is an interesting new option for people struggling with multiple subscriptions.

You may recall that I wrote about an interesting workaround that let you convert an Office 365 Personal subscription to a much more useful Office 365 Home subscription for just $9.99 back in January. This was necessitated because Microsoft didn’t—still doesn’t—let you attach two different Office 365 subscriptions to the same Microsoft account. And because so many new PCs and devices (and even newer Lumia handsets) come with an Office 365 Personal subscription, people who were already paying for Office 365 Home were kind of stuck.

Office 365 Personal, as you may know, is valued at $69.99 and provides one person with the ability to install full Office on one PC. But Office 365 Home, valued at $99.99, is much more liberal: it provides 5 people with the ability to install full Office on 5 PCs. So for $30 more, you get 4 more full Office installs. It’s a pretty incredible deal.

Which explains my previous workaround.

But now there is a simpler way to handle this, and it’s officially supported by Microsoft: If you attempt to activate an Office 365 Personal subscription that you obtained with a new PC or device using an account for which there is already an Office 365 Home subscription, you’re presented with this screen.

You have two choices: you can convert that Office 365 Personal subscription to an additional nine months of your existing Office 365 Home subscription. Or, you can convert your existing Office 365 Home subscription to an Office 365 Personal subscription. Obviously, you should do the former.

By the way, that “Help me decide” link pushes you to What happens if I add multiple Office 365 subscription plans to my account? on the Microsoft Office web site. That page goes into more detail than I do above, but the gist is the same: Adding 9 months to your Office 365 Home subscription is clearly the way to go.

Thanks very much to MJK for the tip. I’ve verified that it works using an Office 365 Personal product key I’d never activated.

Note: I made an honest mistake with the number of licenses you get with Office 365 Home and fixed the article. –Paul