Activation¶

Your license key looks like:

RFCT-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX

It was emailed to the address you used at checkout (and shown on the post-purchase download page).

Activate¶

You can activate from either the Office task pane or the Refractions menu bar app — both hit the same endpoint and the result is shared.

From the task pane (PowerPoint, Word, or Excel):

1. Open Office and click Refractions on the Home ribbon.
2. Paste your license key into the Enter License Key field.
3. Click Activate.

From the Refractions menu bar app:

1. Click the Refractions icon in your menu bar → Open Refractions…
2. Switch to the License tab. (If you don't have a key yet, click Buy a license — it opens the pricing page.)
3. Paste your key and click Activate.

The daemon contacts https://refractions.app/api/validate-license/, registers your Mac, and the task pane switches to the normal chart editor.

How seats work¶

Each Mac is identified by a SHA-256 fingerprint of its hostname and primary MAC address — it's stable across reboots and is not personally identifying.

The daemon re-validates the license once every 24 hours. If refractions.app is unreachable, refractions uses the cached validation for up to 7 days.

Activating on a new Mac¶

Each seat activates 1 Mac at a time. If you're switching laptops, reinstalling, or moving to a new machine, deactivate the old one yourself — no support ticket required.

1. Go to refractions.app/lab/login/ and enter the email your license seat was issued to.
2. Open the magic-link email and click through to your seat page.
3. Under Activated machines, click Deactivate next to the old Mac.
4. Activate the new Mac the normal way (paste the key into the task pane).

The deactivated Mac will stop validating within 7 days (the daemon caches the last validation that long; before that, restart the daemon to drop the cache immediately).

Common errors¶