MS Office 365 installation issue on MacBook Pro 2012mid with Catalina

There is a *possibility* you may be able to install Office 365 on Catalina.

The final version of Office 365 that was compatible with Catalina was v.16.63 (July 12, 2022). You should be able to download that installer from Microsoft's Update History For Office for Mac. Scroll down to the line for July 12, 2022 version 16.63 and download the installer package for Office Suite with Teams or without Teams, whichever you prefer. You should then be able to install it.

What to do before installing Office 365 - 1) make sure you have Catalina 10.15.7 installed, 2) if you have any previous version of MS Office already installed, remove it completely, 3) if you are logged into your Microsoft account, log out of it.

Note (here this is the "possibility" piece). You still need an Office 365 license to activate the installation. There is a 1-month free trial available, so you could sign up for the free trial and see if you can activate your installation. If it doesn't work you can cancel the subscription before the end of the 1-month trial.

Please let us know if this works!

For full disclosure, I have not done this myself, so I cannot claim that it works, only that it is a possibility. But after I suggested this technique to another user last month, he reported that it worked!

I'm sorry, friend, you're out of luck.

Microsoft no longer supports installation of Office on older macOS systems. They currently only support the three most current macOS versions; macOS 15 Sequoia, macOS 14 Sonoma and macOS 13 Ventura.

You should look into Office alternatives for that older Mac.

The free LibreOffice is one such alternative. There are others.