Activating Office 2019 without Microsoft account

Microsoft is actively pushing it's user base towards clouds and subscriptions. But there will always be people hesitant to trust their private data to corporations, especially in this age of private data leaks left and right.

When releasing Office 2019 - Microsoft did another step in this direction and required to enter Microsoft account when activating your new Office 2019 purchase. If you don't enter account - activation will not finish, there is just no way to skip it in UI. Although, there is still a way to skip it via console activation... :

Run CMD.exe/Powershell with admin priveleges, go to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office16" and run these commands:

cscript OSPP.VBS /inpkey:XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX
cscript OSPP.VBS /act

Replace XXXXX-XX... with the actual key. Restart office programs - and enjoy your genuine and activated Office 2019 completely offline. I guess we cannot hope that Microsoft will realize the importance of having completely offline option of their products, so they will start (slowly at first) loosing users to older versions of Microsoft products and open-source alternatives.

PS. If you like OneNote - it's already time to start looking for open-source alternatives. Sorry Microsoft, I am not uploading my notes to you.