All University web hosted services will be at risk of downtime every Tuesday between 7am to 9am.

Jump to accessibility statement Skip to content

Information around issues you may have when we change the sign-in address/username on your old Office 365 account

Home / Help and Advice / Office 365 / Connect / Students / Sign-in change on 'old' Office 365 account

We are changing your sign-in/username on your 'old' Office 365 account

We need to ensure that you belong to our new Office 365 service so that you can benefit from our improved online teaching and learning environment. To do this, we will need to change your sign-in/username address on your 'old' Office 365 account only. We will be doing this on the 19th June 2020.

The below table will outline what your sign-in/username will change to:

Before After 
bg0abc@student.sunderland.ac.uk bg0abc@studentsunderlandacuk.onmicrosoft.com
bg0abc@research.sunderland.ac.uk bg0abc@researchsunderlandacuk.onmicrosoft.com
john.smith@research.sunderland.ac.uk john.smith@researchsunderlandacuk.onmicrosoft.com

Your university Office 365 sign-in address for your new account will still be UserID@student.sunderland.ac.uk e.g. bg0abc@student.sunderland.ac.uk - the above changes are only applicable to your 'old' Office 365 account which will be getting closed.

What will happen if I am editing a document online when my username changes?

Once we have made the change, you may experience some error messages when editing any documents in your 'old' Office 365 account, these messages are outlined below with the steps you need to take to regain access to your documents.

When you use the Microsoft Office online apps to edit documents and files in your web browser, the file is normally saved automatically as you work.

If you are in the middle of editing a file when we change your username, this will break and you will see something like this:

You must stop working on the document straight away – any further changes will not be saved!

If you refresh the page, you will see something like this:

At this point you should log out of Office 365 and log back in again using the modified username that ends with @researchsunderlandacuk.onmicrosoft.com or @studentsunderlandacuk.onmicrosoft.com. You may need to close your browser to log out completely.

What will happen if I am editing a document in the desktop version of Office when my username changes?

If you are editing a document or file that is saved to your OneDrive in the desktop version of one of the Office applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint…) then it will save your file regularly automatically.

When we change your username you will see something like this:

At this point you should stop working on the document (but don’t close it). Click ‘File’ in the top left corner. You should see something like this:

There will be a yellow box around your Sunderland OneDrive and a message that says to connect “you’ll need your user name and password”.

Click “Connect”. A window will appear, showing your original username:

Change the address to either <UserID>@researchsunderlandacuk.onmicrosoft.com or <UserID>@studentsunderlandacuk.onmicrosoft.com (for students with a research account) so that it looks like this:

Click ‘Next’, and then type in the same password you normally would for your Office 365 account. Once the login has been completed successfully, you should see a screen like this:

There is no longer a yellow box and OneDrive and Sites are shown under ‘Connected Services’

If you have any problems, make sure you ‘Save a Copy’ of your file temporarily to somewhere safe on your computer, otherwise you might lose the last few minutes of work.

What will happen to my OneDrive desktop client?

If you are logged on to a computer with the OneDrive desktop client installed and configured to sync your OneDrive, this will break when we change your username.

The icon in the taskbar will show that it is stuck ‘Syncing’.

If you fix the account in one of the Office applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint…) this will also fix OneDrive.

Alternatively, simply log out of your computer and log back in. When OneDrive starts again it will automatically update your username and sign in successfully.