A friend of mine has one of the latest MacBook pros. It is a rather lovely machine! But it had a weird glitch when we tried to install Office. It threw this error:
“The installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.”
A remarkably unhelpful message, if I say so myself. First guess: corrupted download file. So I deleted the pkg file (it’s the Mac software installation package), redownloaded it, attempted to reinstall it, and got the same error.
Ok, delete the pkg file again, empty the trash, rebooted, downloaded it again, started the installation, got the SAME error message. Now I’m puzzled. So, time to google it. And, bless the google gods, I found this quickly.
Solution for “The installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail”
I was a bit suspicious, though, when the answer was a link to another site.
Control access to files and folders on Mac
However, this was spot on. It was a rather simple issue. I needed to grant access to the download folder to the Installer. Just a few commands to enter and, boom, Office was able to install.
- Choose Apple menu
- System Settings, then click Privacy & Security
- In the sidebar. (You may need to scroll down) click Files and Folders.
- For each app in the list, turn the ability to access files and folders in specific locations on or off. In this case, “Installer”
I hope you don’t have this issue, but if you do, may this grant you peace after your frustrations.
