

Since then, I've had another go at reinstalling Office, but this time the Microsoft server wouldn't accept my login password, even though it happily accepted the Product Key and my e-mail address. After nearly a day's work I concluded that there was simply no means of getting rid of OneDrive, it's compulsory it seems, so I decided to use Time Machine on my Mac to roll back to the pre-Office situation, getting rid of the Office account. I logged in at the account and deleted what I could, then returned to investigate the OneDrive interface on my Mac in some detail.
HOW TO ACTIVATE OFFICE 2011 OFFLINE
From the security angle, this was the very opposite of what I wanted to have happen, as I use secure offline methods for storing all my files. However, I was utterly shocked to find that, after installing and activating, OneDrive was definitely running, and was actually copying every single personal/private file of mine from my entire system to the server! This was happening irrespective of whether I was signed in to the MS account or not. The trick then was to click on 'Install', not 'Standard Install'. I specifically didn't want those two, so I deselected them. This gave all the app's components to choose for installing, including OneNote and OneDrive.
HOW TO ACTIVATE OFFICE 2011 INSTALL
That's to say, when I got to the Install caption of the Setup, instead of gayly clicking on Install I selected the Customise button. I'm not sure if that's currently available also on your H & B version. And incidentally, in the setup process for the installation I found on my copy (as with my previous edition) that I could select/deselect various of Office's components. Initially, I had no problem in installing the app and then activating it. I recall also that you have to look in your e-mail inbox for a confirmation message from Microsoft.

Don't know if yours is similar but with mine (the H & S version) you have to sign in to the MS account in order to manage it, and there's a setting for that on the Office menu bar at top of screen. I too recently purchased much the same retail version of MS Office for Mac2019 - at enormous expense I might add, reckoning that, once installed, it'd probably serve me well for around three years minimum.
