Office Deployment Tool won't recognise downloaded install files and tries to re-download

I FINALLY cracked it with the help of the ODT log files.

Basically, unlike what the docs say, manually setting a SourcePath is mandatory if you want a local/offline install, and the source path should exclude the top level directory name of the install bundle (so should not end with Office unless you've got a folder named Office inside another folder named Office).

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My problem was caused by two misleading / out-of-date points in Microsoft's Configuration file reference page, coupled with the complete lack of feedback in the installer UI. Specifically:

• MS give this as an example of a typical SourcePath entry: C:\Preload\Office - so I had entered my source paths similarly: C:\odt\Office, including "Office", the name of the top level bundle folder. This was causing the installer to fail to find my downloaded files - it should exclude the folder name of the bundle. My source path should have been SourcePath="C:\odt" and Microsoft's example should have been C:\Preload (or, they should have a note saying this only works for paths like C:\Preload\Office\Office\Data\etc...
• MS say the following:

If you don’t specify SourcePath in configure mode, Setup will look in the current folder for the Office source files. If the Office source files aren’t found in the current folder, Setup will look on Office 365 for them.

Maybe that was true for Office 2013, I don't know, but based on my hours of trial and error, the inverse appears to be true for Office 2016.

When I ran the setup.exe with no SourcePath in the config file, it looked online before checking for a local copy, and began a download instead of using a local copy in the default position in the same directory.

<speculation> I guess such a change would be consistent with Microsoft's changing attitudes to updates, which were roughly "Use the latest version cautiously, it might break things" in 2012 and are roughly "If in doubt, update update update" today?</speculation>

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My settings which worked looked like this:

<Configuration>

  <Add OfficeClientEdition="32" Branch="Current" Version="16.0.4229.1029" SourcePath="C:\odt">
    <Product ID="O365BusinessRetail">
      <Language ID="en-us" />
    </Product>
  </Add>

  <Logging Level="Standard" Path="C:\odt\log" />

</Configuration>

I don't believe the version number is essential (and I'm not re-installing to find out!); if anyone with similar problems discovers they do need theirs, I took mine from the folder name under Office\Data.

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If anyone knows how I can report the issues with the documentation to Microsoft, please drop me a comment.

If you put setup.exe in the C:\ODT folder along with your config XML file then run:

setup.exe /download configuration.xml

it will create an "Office" folder in C:\ODT and all the source files will be in there. You then just run:

setup.exe /configure configuration.xml

and it should work fine. You do not need to specify the source in your XML file.

The issue is that you placed your setup.exe and configuration.xml files one folder too deep, in the Office folder. They needed to be in the ODT folder in order to not require the source to be configured. If Microsoft had not provided you the files already that would have been pretty obvious when you ran the download switch as mentioned above.