When I started writing this story, I thought it was going to be a rant. Instead it's more testimony to unnecessary hassle. Obviously, we're talking about Microsoft.

Most of you know that a few years ago. Although I had Office 2013 licenses as an educator through school, I moved to Office 365 to gain access to Office 365-hosted Exchange. Then, just about a year ago, and haven't looked back. Although I cancelled my Office 365 Midsize Business plan, I still have my Office 2013 license for my PCs and my Office 2011 license for my Macs. Yep, there it is. That's the start of this story. I get downloadable Office from the school where I teach, but they only have Office 2011 for Mac.

As you probably know, and it's much more in line with the PC version of Office 2013 we're all used to. Office 2011 for Mac is so bad that I have a Parallels install of Windows on most of my Macs, just to run Office 2013 in a Windows virtual machine. Yesterday afternoon, I caved. I do a tremendous amount of work in Word and PowerPoint, and I just wanted them to run natively on my Macs. I wanted to use Office 2016 and stop all the weirdness that I have to go through when running a Windows instance to edit a Word file. Unfortunately, while the university has an Office 2011 for Mac license, they haven't yet updated to Office 2016 for Mac, which will probably be sometime this fall. So, at only $89 for the year (with a ten buck academic discount), I bought my own license.

You can see my receipt right there, in the screenshot below. Are you starting to feel the dread? After a year or so away from doing Microsoft installs, I'd forgotten just how much of a DMV-like experience dealing with Microsoft products can be. Let the runaround begin. One note before I begin. You don't have to read all of this if you don't want. It's just the account of the hassles I went through attempting to do what should have been a very simple process.

The tl;dr of Microsoft is often the same: the hassles you go through in an attempt to do what should have been a very simple process. And with that, the hassles. The first install Look at that 'Thank you for your order' screenshot carefully. Do you see the nice blue 'Install Office' button? Yeah, so did I. I even clicked it.

The result was a downloaded installer package, which I then ran. After a little whirring and blinking, the installer ran and Office 2016 for Mac was on my Mac. Clicking Done resulted in the installer launching Word, with a nice blue intro screen. Then came the sign in screen. I dutifully typed in my email address and then cut and pasted my password. A prompt showed up asking if I wanted to use my Office account or my company account.

That was, admittedly, a bit baffling because I bought Office Home edition, but hey, I'm tough, I can handle it. After thinking on it a bit, I ascertained that the message came up because my email address is a custom domain, not something like @gmail.com or @live.com, etc. Since I wasn't using an @live.com or an @outlook.com account, I selected the company option.

It wouldn't let me go any further. The Sign In button had been replaced by a Cancel button. I still had my receipt page open in my browser, with a nice 'Contact Us for help' button available, so I opened up a chat conversation with a Microsoft support rep: DG: I am trying to sign in to activate, and it recognizes my email and password, but asks if I want to use Microsoft Account or Work Account. Which one is associated with this purchase? Microsoft: Okay no worries, as I'd be happy to assist you with anything regarding Microsoft products! You will want to select Microsoft Account. At this point, I should point out two things.

First, my Microsoft rep was 'Paris H' (yeah, not kidding) and after selecting Microsoft Account, it asked me for my username and password again. I tried logging in and was greeted with the unable to activate message below: DG: It says unable to activate Office. Paris H: What email address are you trying to use? (I answered with my personal email address) Paris H: Just a moment while I look into that for you. Please click here for Office Account Sign In. Sign into your account from there and you should be able to locate the install button. Let's take a moment to get sidetracked about the use of, you know, the English language.

Product Data Microsoft Office For Mac

Microsoft calls its product 'Office' and with that comes some linguistic responsibility. I knew what she meant by using my Office Account instead of my Work Account, but seriously? That stuff can make you crazy pretty quickly. 'Click here' was a page off of stores.office.com/myaccount/. It turns out, there was an Install button there as well. So, having already installed Office 2016 and failed in activating it, I asked the obvious question: DG: I'm signed in, but do I need to install Office again?

Should I delete it first? Paris H: If it is already installed, open up Word 2013 and then click on your name in the top right. Sign out and then sign back in. That didn't work, because I'd already ran into the problem of opening up Word 2013. All I could think of was, 'You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.'

Okay, let's try this again. DG: It won't let me. It insists I sign in, and is giving me the unable to activate Office message. Paris H: What I would recommend you do is uninstall and reinstall the software. Yep, uninstall the software I just installed and then reinstall it so that it might activate. That's got Microsoft DNA written all over it.

Uninstalling Office Given that this is a Mac and we're talking Office here, I knew in the marrow of my bones that just taking the applications out of the Applications folder and trashing them wouldn't be enough. So I asked for advice. After all, I was still talking with Paris H., and you just don't close the window on Paris H. Until the experience is complete. DG: How do I uninstall office on a Mac? Paris H: Please click here for Uninstall Office 2011 from a Mac The link was to instructions for uninstalling Office 2011.

I didn't have Office 2011 on this machine. I had just bought, installed, and attempted to use Office 2016. So, I tried again. DG: No, I have Office 2016 that I need to uninstall because it won't activate. How do I uninstall the brand new Office I just bought because I can't use it? Okay, so I might have been getting a little testy.

Paris H: I am checking on this now. (Some time went by) Paris H: Please for Uninstall Office 2016 for Mac This time the link was more appropriate to the problem. The instructions weren't correct, but the link was right. If you follow the link, you'll see it advises three stages of activity: removing the applications from the Applications folder, deleting a.plist file from the system Library folder and deleting an indeterminate number of.plist files from the user's Library folder.

In the second stage, the instructions state 'In the LaunchDaemons folder, Control+click or right-click com.microsoft.officeprefs.plist and click Move to Trash.' But, as it turns out: DG: The file specified in Library, com.microsoft.officeprefs.plist, does not exist. There is a file com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.helper.plist. Is this what should be removed? Yepper, the instructions Microsoft provided for uninstalling Office were wrong. Can you imagine run-of-the-mill Mac users digging in their Library folder?

Can you imagine how bad it could be if someone deleted the wrong.plist file? Think randomly deleting INI files in your System32 folder and you get the idea.

At this point, I'm thinking Paris H started to lose patience with me. I was instantly told 'Yes, that appears to be correct.'

And I'm guessing that if ol' Paris had to look up how to uninstall Office, knowing which.plist file to remove wasn't something she could really confirm off the top of her head. Right after telling me that removing com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.helper.plist appeared to be a sound strategy, I was dismissed and my celebrity Paris H experience was at an end: Paris H: Okay, excellent and if you have troubles you can contact us back at anytime. Paris H: Thanks again for chatting with us at the Microsoft Store, we appreciate your business! MS (clearly not Paris H): Thank you for chatting with us. Please click the 'Close' button on the top right of the chat window to tell us how we did today. When it comes to installing Office 2016 on the Mac, at least I'll always have Paris.

Office For Mac

And I went on with the process. Reinstalling Office 2016 This time, rather than downloading and installing Office 2016 for Mac from the Install Office button on my receipt, I went back to the link Paris provided, at stores.office.com/myaccount/ and hit that install button. The screen image below shows that I have one install (because I finally do), but when I got to this screen originally, the install count showed zero. I hit the big red button. I was encouraged by one thing. I had started to worry that I bought the software using my personal email address and because I got an educational discount, perhaps the sign-in required one of my school email addresses. But as soon as I hit the red Install button, I got the following screen: In the third step, the screen showed the email address I was supposed to sign in under, and it was my personal email address, the address I used to buy the software.

So at least that was something. Eventually, the software downloaded and I subsequently ran the installer (which was functionally identical to the first installer run). Once the installation was complete, Word once again opened, and I tried logging in.

I was able to login and was, in fact, able to activate Word. Or so I thought. Satisfied with what I thought was a completed installation and activation process, I opened up the Word document I wanted to edit all along. At which point I got this message: Special, right?

I took a moment to remind myself that it's just software and then took a couple of calming deep breaths. Then I clicked the Activate button. It went through the sign-in process again, and this time, Word reopened, but without any 'you must activate' message.

I have subsequently been able to launch PowerPoint and Excel and they work without any activation messages. So, yay about that. Final thoughts I actively jump between three different Macs and one of the reasons I was willing to once again get into Microsoft's subscription clutches is their 5-machine deal with Office is quite reasonable.

However, I'm certainly not looking forward to (okay, let's be honest: dreading) this activation hassle on the other two machines. I thusly: 'Microsoft builds incredibly deep, powerful, and flexible software products that - before they see the light of day - must be infused with a level of unnecessary inconvenience, incomprehensible restrictions, and regressive policies such that all possible joy has been removed prior to customer contact.' Yep, they're on mission.

I came back to Microsoft for this product evolution. But the future? Gosh, I'm getting tired of the hassles Microsoft seems to engineer into their products. I'm certainly going to advocate for solutions that are less hassle. The thing is, there are a lot of substitute solutions and losing hours to Microsoft's unnecessary inconvenience, incomprehensible restrictions, and regressive policies is getting really, really old.

When customers dread installing your software, you've got some serious problems. By the way, I'm doing more updates on Twitter and Facebook than ever before. Be sure to follow me on Twitter at and on Facebook at. Related Topics. By registering you become a member of the CBS Interactive family of sites and you have read and agree to the,.

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Turning on and using Call Quality Dashboard for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online. 10/4/2018. 10 minutes to read. Contributors.

Applies to: Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams In this article Learn how to configure your Office 365 organization to use the Call Quality Dashboard to monitor call quality. The Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online allows you to gain insights into the quality of calls made using Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business services.

This topic describes the steps you'll need to complete to start collecting data. Note The CQD detailed reports are currently available as Tech Preview but available to all customers. Latest changes and updates The most recent changes to CQD are as follows:. Includes Microsoft Teams data in addition to Skype for Business Online data. Summary reports include a product filter to select all data, Microsoft Teams data, or Skype for Business Online data. Video and VBSS stream quality classification logic has been updated. Refer to for the latest classifier definitions.

Refer to this article for a list of. Note Information about updates and changes to the dashboard can be found by clicking the link in the Good news!

Banner when it is displayed on the dashboard. Activate Microsoft Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) Summary Reports Before you can start using the CQD, you'll need to activate it for your Office 365 organization. Using the Skype for Business admin center. Sign in to your Office 365 organization using an admin account, and then select the Admin tile to open the Admin center. In the left pane, under Admin centers, select Skype for Business to open the Skype for Business admin center. In the Skype for Business admin center, select Tools in the left pane, and then select Skype for Business Online Call Quality Dashboard. On the page that opens, sign in with your Global Administrator account, and then provide the credentials for the account when prompted.

Productdata: Microsoft Office For Mac Pro

After you sign in, once activated, the CQD will begin collecting and processing data. Note It may take a couple of hours to process enough data to display meaningful results in the reports. Features of the Call Quality Dashboard for Skype for Business Online CQD Summary Reports provide a subset of the features planned for Detailed Reports. Note The following example is from a very small sample data set, and the values aren't realistic for an actual deployment. The overall stream volume is an important factor in determining how relevant the calculated Poor percentages are.

The smaller the volume of overall streams, the less reliable the reported Poor percentage values are. Server-Client tab and Client-Client tabs These two tabs provide additional details for the streams that took place in their endpoint-to-endpoint scenarios. Both tabs have four collapsible sections, representing four scenarios under which media streams would flow.

Wired Inside. Wired Outside. Wifi Inside. Wifi Outside Inside Test During processing, the CQD back-end classifies a stream as Inside or Outside using Building information, if it exists.

Endpoints of each stream are associated with a subnet address. If the subnet is in the list of the subnets marked InsideCorp in the uploaded Building information, then it is considered Inside. If Building information has not yet been uploaded, then Inside Test will always classify the streams as Outside. Please note that Inside Test for Server-Client scenario only considers the client endpoint. Because servers are always outside from a user's perspective, this isn't accounted for in the test. Wifi As the names indicate, this is a classification criteria based on the type of client connections. Again, server is always wired and it isn't included in the calculation.

Note Given a stream, if one of the two endpoints is connected to a Wifi network, then it is classified as Wifi in CQD. Selecting product data to see in reports In the Summary and Location Enhanced Reports, you can use the Product Filter drop-down to show all product data, only Microsoft Teams data, or only Skype for Business Online data.

In Detailed reports, you can use the Is Teams dimension to filter the data to Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business Online data as part of defining the report. Upload Building information The CQD Summary Reports dashboard includes a Tenant Data Upload page, accessed by selecting Tenant Data Upload from the settings menu in the top-right corner. This page is used for admins to upload their own information, such as mapping of IP address and geographical information, mapping each wireless AP and its MAC address, etc. On the Tenant Data Upload page, use the drop-down menu to choose a data file type for uploading. The file data type denotes the content of the file (for example, 'Building' refers to mapping of IP address and building as well as other geographical information). Currently we are only supporting the 'Building' data type. A few more data types will be added with subsequent releases.

After selecting the file data type, click Browse to choose a data file. The data file must be a.tsv (Tab-separated values) file or a.csv (Comma-separated value) file. If using a.csv file, any field that contains a comma must be surrounded by quotes or have the comma removed.

For example, if your building name is NY,NY, in the.csv file it should be entered as 'NY,NY'. The data file must be no larger than 50MB in size. For each data file, each column in the file must match a predefined data type, discussed later in this topic. After selecting a data file, specify Start date and, optionally, Specify an end date. After selecting Start date, select Upload to upload the file to the CQD server. Before the file is uploaded, it is first validated. Once validated, it is stored in an Azure blob.

If validation fails or the file fails to be stored in an Azure blob, an error message is displayed requesting a correction to the file. The following image shows an error occurring when the number of columns in the data file is incorrect. If no errors occur during validation, the file upload will succeed. You can then see the uploaded data file in the My uploads table, which shows the full list of all uploaded files for the current tenant at the bottom of that page. Each record shows one uploaded tenant data file, with file type, last update time, time period, description, a remove icon, and a download icon. To remove a file, select the trash bin icon in the table.

To download a file, select the download icon in the Download column of the table. Tenant data file format and Building data file structure The format of the data file you upload must meet the following to pass the validation check before uploading. The file must be either a.tsv file, which means, in each row, columns are separated by a TAB, or a.csv file with each column separated by a comma. The content of the data file doesn't include table headers.

That means the first line of the data file should be real data, not headers like 'Network,' etc. For each column, the data type can only be String, Number, or Bool. If it is Number, the value must be a numeric value; if it is Bool, the value must be either 0 or 1.

For each column, if the data type is string, the data can be empty (but still must be separated by an appropriate delimiter (i.e., a tab or comma). This just assigns that field an empty string value. There must be 14 columns for each row, each column must have the following data type, and the columns must be in the order listed in the following table: Column Name Data type Example Network String 192.168.1.0 NetworkName String USA/Seattle/SEATTLE-SEA-1 NetworkRange Number 26 BuildingName String SEATTLE-SEA-1 OwnershipType String Contoso BuildingType String IT Termination BuildingOfficeType String Engineering City String Seattle ZipCode String 98001 Country String US State String WA Region String MSUS InsideCorp Bool 1 ExpressRoute Bool 0. Important The network range can be used to represent a supernet (combination of several subnets with a single routing prefix). All new building uploads will be checked for any overlapping ranges.

If you have previously uploaded a building file, you should download the current file and re-upload it to identify any overlaps and fix the issue before uploading again. Any overlap in previously uploaded files may result in the wrong mappings of subnets to buildings in the reports. Certain VPN implementations do not accurately report the subnet information. It is recommended that when adding a VPN subnet to the building file, instead of one entry for the subnet, separate entries are added for each address in the VPN subnet as a separate 32-bit network. Each row can have the same building metadata. For example, instead of one row for 172.16.18.0/24, you should have 256 rows, with one row for each address between 172.16.18.0/32 and 172.16.18.255/32, inclusive.

Selecting media type in detailed reports The detailed reports support looking at quality and media reliability for audio, video, application sharing, and video-based screen-sharing media types. Dimensions, measures, and filters that are specific to a single media type have 'Audio', 'Video', 'AppSharing', or 'VBSS' as a prefix.

If you want to view the dimensions and measures for a single media type, the new MediaType dimension and filter may be required. For example, to have a report that shows the total session counts across different media types, include the MediaType dimension. Related topics Feedback.