It works differently with a personal account then a school or work account. I am going to assume on the personal account that you haven’t enabled MS authenticator, but on school / work I will assume that you have added the Microsoft authenticator.
Personal
1. Enable 2fa
- go to the microsoft account security page and enable 2fa1
- Make sure to save your backup code
- Make sure you do the steps provided to you when you use your mail account on a mobile2
2. Add the authenticator
- click on “add a method to verify” and click then on “use an app”3
- it will tell you to download the MS authenticator if you don’t have it yet, but there is a sneaky blue text that you can click to use another authenticator. 4
- here are the steps provided to enable 2fa with for example: the google authenticator.5
- If you cant scan the QR code, like for example, when you use bitwarden, you should copy paste the code you get when you click “I cant scan the qr code”
School or work
- go to this cool page. I see something like the footnote, if it looks different that’s okay. Companies can style this page but the functionality stays.6
- click on “add sign-in method” and choose “Microsoft authenticator”
- it will now prompt you to install the MS authenticator if you don’t have it already. but we aren’t doing that. We will click the blue “I want to use a different auth app” text 7
- now you will get the steps to setup your authenticator. you can scan the qr code or if you are using something like Bitwarden that can’t scan QR, click the “can’t scan image” button and copy the code.
- you can now delete the old method from the home page, and it should look something like this image in the footnote.8
