Microsoft Office 2007 In Linux With WINE

Kenneth Reitz writes "Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment ... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."

Comments

Ummm....Nope.

[JustNiz]

>> Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution?

Umm nope. I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy. The words nice, Clean, and Microsoft just don't belong in the same sentence. And why sully a nice, clean Linux installation by letting anything from Microsoft come into contact with it? I'll stick with OpenOffice thanks.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree, why bother?
If I want to do something important I use LaTex, if not then OpenOffice works just fine.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[whoever57]

Umm nope. I'd rather have a frontal lobotomy. The words nice, Clean, and Microsoft just don't belong in the same sentence. And why sully a nice, clean Linux installation by letting anything from Microsoft come into contact with it? I'll stick with OpenOffice thanks.

[Quickly pulls numbers out of thin air] I strongly suspect that the number of people who need features present in Office 2007 but not in OOo 3.x is a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[xSauronx]

This isnt news, really. I snagged Crossover Office last year when it was free and installed Office 2007 so I wouldnt have to load a VM to use it. Unfortunately, as a student, a few of my assignments require 2007, and Id rather run it on my laptop than stick around school doing work.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

And why sully a nice, clean Linux installation by letting anything from Microsoft come into contact with it?

Because all the nasty Microsoft cruft will be sandboxed into ~/.wine/drive_c Your / will remain clear.

With WINE, clearing bloat is as easy as rm -rf .wine :)

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Shados]

When you add all the plugins/add-ons/integration with 3rd party software/sharepoint integration/how almost half of Office doesn't have an OOo equivalent at all, never mind feature for feature, and the fact that the percentage of employees in a company doing accounting (well, accounting firms aside...) is relatively low, and I wouldn't be surprised if you were wrong by an order of magnitude or two...

Now, if it was companies instead of individuals, maybe.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Office 2007 is absolutely horrible. It's unbelievably sluggish, and the user interface is gawd-awful. I'd rather use vi and nroff. And this is in Windows!

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[fractoid]

Not even gonna bother asking for a citation on that, because I just started work in a company that does financial software, and lock-in is a large part of (from what I can see) most such companies' business models.

Does Quickbooks ( / other package ) run in Wine?

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[digitalunity]

The numbers you just pulled out of thin air are pretty much bullshit.

For a lot of companies, Office is mandatory for them to function. Instead of hiring programmers to create good solutions, they have managers and analysts sitting around creating the next business-vital piece of shit package of Excel, Word and Access VB scripts to fill a role. Oh and don't even get me started on huge companies who put business critical data on shared drives as MS Access applications. Like it or not, these are the people who can't switch to Linux because they need Office.

As Shados mentioned, OO.org is missing certain MS Office features entirely.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[XMode]

And just to clarify, by 'need Office' please read 'stupidly made themselves dependent on certain office features that are not present in others software and cant or don't know how to change their package to work on a different system'.

These are also the people that get stung when MS changes the scripting language and breaks stuff.

The only thing I have seen an actual business case for that I would agree with is shared calendars in outlook/exchange. Although I haven't looked very hard I have yet to see another software package that is available for linux that has such an easy calendar implementation.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you make yourself stupidly dependent on FEATURES not available in competing software? So people that need to make pie charts that can't swap to using NoPieChartingAvailableOfficeSuite have made themselves stupidly dependent on a feature not available in it?

Competing by features is the whole point that software competition is supposed to revolve around for christ's sake.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Quintilian]

Same here, I got it when it was free and installed Office 2007 no problem.

The tutorial seemed to make it more difficult by only explaining how to do it in the terminal. I had no trouble installing it using the gui and didn't have to mess with the terminal at all. It seems that when people only explain how to do it the "harder" way (in a terminal instead of with pretty pictures) that only makes people less likely to try linux (again-if this was the only thing holding them back) i would think, because it may look too difficult or complicated for them.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[tuxgeek]

Most users don't use/need all the additional bloated crap packaged in Office. Most just require a good word processor and spreadsheet. Maybe a data base. OOo fits this bill very well.

Me, I'm a contractor, and OOo Writer is perfect for contract documents. Calc handles statements, invoices, payroll and calculation of payroll taxes, bidding calculations, and most anything else. So for most, which option is a wise choice? Cough up hundreds of $$$ for Office, or use OOo which comes standard with most all Linux distributions. This is a no brainer.

But of course life is not this easy for all, and if you're one of the few that needs certain other features found only in Office and have no other alternatives, then you're pwned.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Yfrwlf]

Damn that sucks, I'd organise an appeal for the student body to have teachers adopt non-proprietary software. To be teaching proprietary software especially with things like this, a stupid office suite, and demanding it's use, is just all kinds of dumb, and I believe wrong for a college to do. And some people wonder why "student software" is so cheap, like a drug sample. No, students should have the freedom to choose which office software they want to use to complete an assignment.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[MBGMorden]

It's not always a matter of a single user though. I know that our users use a TON of spreadsheets for example. Half of them don't know how to do much more than plug in numbers into the assigned spots, but they'll still use spreadsheets developed by someone else (we have someone in IT who does Office training who normally will develop spreadsheets for a user if they need help - usually for comparing values. Our Assessor uses a lot them to plot housing sales values in a given area for example in order to determine a proper per sq ft value for property there).

Now, I'm known as the "open source guy" at work. I do my best to promote it where possible, and trust me I get "the look" whenever I bring up an open source solution in a meeting. That said, another employee suggested that we might look at OOo as a way to cut costs a bit. Because of my aforementioned "open source guy" status, it got thrown in my lap to determine how well it would work.

Long story short, around a quarter or more of the spreadsheets that I opened simply didn't work correctly. Even some of the Word documents had some minor formatting errors. The database engine crashed on me quite a bit, and had no Access compatibility whatsoever (though we generally swat a user with a stick if we find them using Access for anything other than a frontend to a server side database). I'll give them credit and say that Impress (the PowerPoint clone) seemed to open everything I threw at it with VERY few glitches (some transitions didn't work right but that's very minor).

All in all though, I ended up recommending that we stick with Office. It just wasn't worth the hassle of determining whether a document would work, and if it didn't going through and correcting everything so that it DOES work.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Galois2]

Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution?

Before trying to get a nice, clean installation of MS Office on linux, how about we wait until a nice, clean installation of MS Office is available for Windows? I haven't seen anything nice or clean yet. MS Office can't even open its own, older files securely (and so MS doesn't allow it to try), and file format isn't documented so any application that wants to interoperate resorts to reverse engineering. Did you see the piece of crap MS put together for their OOXML "standard"? It's an order of magnitude longer than ODF -- see, e.g., http://government.zdnet.com/images/ooxml.JPG

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Those were my thoughts exactly. I really like OpenOffice 3.0.1. It starts up 'cold' (uncached) on my computer in less than 6 seconds, and starts up cached in less than .5 seconds. I don't want anything else. It does 99.999% of everything the unclean office 2007 does, except there is no draconian licence attached. The only things it does not do are some extremely oddball macros. OOo does macros and some can be extremely wierd, but would be very slightly different than those used with the other suite. It can produce the same results, but the macro is very slightly different. I don't want that other stuff on my nice clean draconian-license-free computer. Its like dropping a big dump of sludge into a grocery card of fresh vegetables. Sure the sludge might be valuable motor oil, but I don't want it in my groceries. I really don't.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.

This always makes me laugh. I've setup accountants in dosbox on Linux with a cira-1980s copy of peachtree accounting because they didn't want to move to 'that new fangled windows stuff.'

As an aside,

Your company picks your corporate desktop for various reasons. One of those is the whole environment of (monkey level) easy to use management tools for huge homogeneous deployments. Another is the large kickbacks from Microsoft for licensing. There are also threats of BSA action for non-license compliance.

Office 2007 working on wine? No thank you. I will keep me non-ribbon infested copy of Office XP. It's what came from corporate.

If you are blessed with being able to install whatever desktop you like, you'd probably still install Windows at least to dual boot.

Why?

I have to remind Linux users again and again and again:

Games.

It's the extreme form of users-use-applications-not-operating-systems. I meet a lot of Linux users whose video game is 'making Ubnutu/SuSE/Gentoo/Mint/etc work.' Other people want to play different games than 'recompile the kernel.'

Yes, PC gamers are beholden to directX and Microsoft. Yes they are unwilling to give up a 5 frames per second edge from that native client. Yes, the demand high-performance from video drivers that work. Yes, they demand that sound doesn't die because someone thought alpha-quality pulseaudio (formerly polyp audio) was awesome because of the name. No, PC gamers aren't interested in your console.

wine can support every single office application from Lotus 1-2-3 up but if someone's PC game is Microsoft OS only, sorry but <soupnazi>no Linux for you!</soupnazi>

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, fucking astroturds!

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmm, that's odd, the only thing I miss in an all Linux system is iTunes because of my music library prior to a full Linux conversion to Slack & Debian... others are great to.

I'd forgo M$ Office for OpenOffice.Org any day, oh wait what's this? I have! the second I found out about OO.o! what? That's right... way back since about 2002! I recently tried opening up a brand spanking new .docx and it worked! it just worked!
As for those GTA games? Mmm, can someone say console? sure whine works(unfortunate gaming corporates look only to the "big two" OSes), but at least I've been Redmond free for years! Sorry Balmer, keep your grubby hand and eh-hem lesser quality software, OUT of MY wallet and MY COMPUTER!

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

OTOH the words Nice, Clean and OOo certainly do belong in one sentence. "Nice, clean uninstall of OOo"... mmm, sounds good. Buggy bloated POS.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our organisation has an internal agreement to use MS Office 2000. But many use yet another version, because of reason XYZ (enter something here). Some because Off2000 won't run on Terminal Server, some because of Features, or because of Cool, ...

Others don't pay for the upgrade. But they use OpenOffice in parallel -- since it was called StarOffice 5 (or 4, I don't remember) actually.

We have lots of problems between MS Office and OpenOffice. We have lots of fixable problems between the different MS Office variants. We have almost no problem with StarOffice / OpenOffice documents created with different versions.

MS Office integrates well (better?) into a MS network with servers etc.pp. In organisations, where all users upgrade at the same time, the differences between the versions won't be that problematic (set aside the user training because of the new GUI); for private users or small firms a complete change to OpenOffice might pay out in the future, if the set of users is "willing".

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dotancohen]

I have to agree, why bother?
If I want to do something important I use LaTex, if not then OpenOffice works just fine.

As much as I hate Microsoft's operating system, their office suite is pretty decent. I happen to like the ribbon design, as a sometimes-user I have no intention of memorizing the menus. MS Office has terrific shortcut support as well, with hit-a-hinting like in Konqueror. I do have a problem with the proprietary document format, but I have heard that MSO 2007 SP-something or other supports ODF so that is not an issue anymore.

However, I am now saving my documents as hybrid PDF-ODF files:
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

This Open Office extension lets the user save a document as a valid PDF file with the original ODT file embedded for editing. This is, in my opinion, the perfect document format: viewable in common software already installed on most desktop systems, and editable in an open source, cross-platform office suite. Furthermore, all the wonderful command-line PDF tools available for Linux work on these documents perfectly. The only thing missing from the extension is better save support, as the user currently must be careful to export (not save) as a Hybrid PDF file. For someone in the habit of hitting Ctrl-S after each sentence, this is quite a limitation.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dotancohen]

[Quickly pulls numbers out of thin air] I strongly suspect that the number of people who need features present in Office 2007 but not in OOo 3.x is a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.

I strongly suspect that the number of people locked into Windows because of Quickbooks is a lot less than the number of people locked into Windows because of the fact that they share documents with other humans.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dotancohen]

...it got thrown in my lap to determine how well it would work...All in all though, I ended up recommending that we stick with Office...

Please post links to the bugs that you filed in an attempt to improve Open Office so that it would work in the future. I'd like to triage some of the bugs and see what I can come up with.

Don't forget to attach spreadsheets of example cases so that the Sun devs can work on it.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dov_0]

For those people who just can't get the hang of using anything else, well, maybe. For those with an IQ over 100, why?

If OpenOffice could get me through 4yrs of degree level study and produce essays with content not only in 3 different languages, but 3 different scripts (alphabets) - one of them right-to-left, who needs the expense and general nuisance of Microsoft Office?

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

He said he promoted open source - he doesn't say he develops it. Why should he bother if he's just going to get snarky comments?

In my experience people don't file bugs for clearly-obviously-broken - they just move on. And you can't just hand out your company's internal documents to the world, and reducing-to-a-testcase isn't always trivial.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Kashgarinn]

I don't think you're seeing things properly then, if that really is your recommendation.

Look at the cost over time.

It might Cost X amount of dollars to switch documents to work with OpenOffice, but after that initial cost, there's no extra licensing cost in using OO, as any documents created in OO should work properly in OO.

However, you will be paying Y per year for the next decades for using MS office.

To really see whether it's cost-efficient in changing, you have to look at these values, and not some arbitrary "Some documents aren't working, and we'd have to do work to convert them, so let's not look at it further"

There are 2 things you have to consider, cost is one of them, usability is another. Regarding usability, I'd get one of these guys who uses excel everyday with what he does, and see whether he can use OO for a week, from scratch though, don't import the older excel files, give him a week to see if he can use it from scratch, if he can, then there's no usability problems.

So you haven't done your job well, hope you still can remedy that.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's perfectly usable on linux with crossover, not faster than open office but fast enough

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[4e617474]

we have someone in IT who does Office training who normally will develop spreadsheets for a user if they need help

That poor fuck. That's like asking IT to show you how to use the toilet because it's got one of those fancy high-tech motion sensor thingies on it.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dotancohen]

I'm not a developer either. I use open source applications, and in turn I file bugs that I find. Where is the contradiction?

"Hello, OOo devs, when doing XYZ the program goes ABC but I was expecting DEF. Here is a small document on which you can perform XYZ. ktnxbye"

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Kjella]

Clearly you've never worked in a major organization. Posting internal spreadsheets attached to bug reports? Yeah, right. Unless you want to be out of a job, you have to run it through proper channels. By the time you're done doing the rounds with legal, who'll again have to ask someone in accounting what this really means you'll be weeks down the road. You might still get no, or demands that you sanitize it in a way that means you can't show the problem anyway. And even if you do there's good chance someone will bug you to reverify the bug is still there in some newer version while most closed source accept that when the bug is reproduced with them, your job is done.

It's a different thing if they were using OpenOffice. But his job is to evaluate it, not waste his and other employees' time developing some third party product they don't use and thus don't contribute to their business. Just opening up the document, conclusing "this doesn't look right at all" is about 100x faster than actually making up a useful bug report with a test case you don't need to run by legal or getting it past legal. Welcome to business realities 101, that's probably why they let a self-admitted open source fan evaluate OpenOffice vs MS Office in the first place. Honestly, I don't know of many companies that would.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[ThaReetLad]

The most used programming language in the world is VBA in excel. Most of the worlds companies have millions of lines of business critical stuff in spreadsheets that would need porting to something else. That's simply not going to happen, even if it was a completely brain dead decision when it was first made.

IIRC there was a merger of two large insurance companies here in the UK a few years ago, and as soon as they tried to rationalise their systems they got stuck because the process relied on circa 30,000 excel spreadsheets with extensive macros.

Switching to an open system that doesn't completely implement excel vba, with full bug compatibility simply isn't an option, because it's good money after bad.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Jane_Dozey]

The few times I saw the requirement for a .doc file I emailed the lecturer and told them that I didn't have Office, didn't have the money to buy it and since it wasn't on the free software repo that we were provided (which actually had quite a bit of expensive MS software), I couldn't use it. Most of the time they wrote back and told me I could hand in a PDF instead. It always worth asking individual lecturers for an alternative. Just be polite, don't do it as part of some geek crusade against Microsoft (have a valid reason) and most people will try and be helpful.

Of course, I did a computer based degree so my lecturers were all savvy enough to deal with different formats.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Locklin]

Hybrid PDF is fine for the final file format, but when you open it in OO, you have to re-export to hybrid pdf every time you want to save. It's not really convenient in the writing stage.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Yfrwlf]

99% of the time however, taking the anti-Microsoft side happens to also be the intelligent/reasonable/correct side, and already comes with many reasons to back it up. Most people don't just hate Microsoft just because, they hate them for real reasons. But yeah, I got your point and agree. It's not just MS, it's Adobe and other pedlars of proprietary software that use tactics to try to push their software on students instead of being fair and using standards where possible.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Carik]

There's a simple reason many people need MS Office: compatibility. When you submit an article to a scientific journal, or a federal grant application commitee, or to a literary journal, or a fiction magazine, or a publisher or any sort, they want it as an MS Word document with specific formatting. Yes, that's not in every field, but it's in enough of them. Maybe that will change someday, but for now, I have a couple hundred users who would quite likely be willing to switch to linux, if only we could get MS Office for them.

Which is better? Having people run a closed OS and a closed offfice suite, or an open OS and a closed office suite? You'll note that open/open isn't a choice there... that's just how it is for a lot of people. Not all, or even probably most, but a lot.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Carik]

"It might Cost X amount of dollars to switch documents to work with OpenOffice, but after that initial cost, there's no extra licensing cost in using OO, as any documents created in OO should work properly in OO."

This is true. And in many cases it's a good argument.

But think about an office that has spent 10 years creating custom spreadsheets with custom equations in them that just don't work in OO.o. The math just isn't there, nor are the graphing features. OK, so they could find different ways to do the same work, but what will it cost them? What does it cost to convert 10 years of custom documents to a new format? And how is the company supposed to pay for it?

Looking at long term costs is important, but you also have to look at the short term costs. I suspect in a lot of cases you're right, and the short term cost will be minimal. But it's certainly not in every case.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Carik]

People doing things other than writing essays.

And people who are writing essays, and need to submit them, correctly formatted, to a professional publication that requires submission in MS Word format.

And people who need Excel because it does things that OO.o spreadsheets just can't do yet.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure he meant stripped down example spreadsheets. The guy working on the bug will want the minimum spreadsheet that still causes the bug.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dov_0]

And people who are writing essays, and need to submit them, correctly formatted, to a professional publication that requires submission in MS Word format.

However some essays need submitting in MS Word format. I've found OpenOffice to be up to the task. Also, just out of interest, what kind of shonky printer uses MS Word format for submissions? Way too dodgy. MS Word can't even preserve formatting between slightly different versions of their own software! Even the same version on two different machines (perhaps slightly different configurations) can stuff up your document. No. Post-script or PDF for professional publications. NOT MS Word.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dov_0]

There's a simple reason many people need MS Office: compatibility. When you submit an article to a scientific journal, or a federal grant application commitee, or to a literary journal, or a fiction magazine, or a publisher or any sort, they want it as an MS Word document with specific formatting. Yes, that's not in every field, but it's in enough of them.

You don't know anything about Openoffice, do you? It can open MS formats and save in them. Has done for years. I've set up a stack of disadvantaged students with Linux and OpenOffice and I have never had a complaint about OpenOffice. Ever.

It's this easy. Just go into Preferences and set the standard formats to the MS ones. Easy.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dov_0]

[Quickly pulls numbers out of thin air] I strongly suspect that the number of people who need features present in Office 2007 but not in OOo 3.x is a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.

Hmm. I have managed Quickbooks on Wine in Linux. MYOB as well. Was for a new immigrant studying Accounting.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dov_0]

MBGMorden. Just out of interest, which version of OpenOffice did you trial? How do you think the current version rates?

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dov_0]

No, I've read your posts and you don't know anything... OO has the maths and the graphs. Get on with life you MS clone.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dov_0]

Does Quickbooks ( / other package ) run in Wine?

Some Quickbooks stuff does. Don't remember how I did it last time. MYOB works well.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dotancohen]

I know, I mentioned that. It really is the only drawback that I've found. I wrote to the developers about that, but have yet to get an answer. I certainly hope that the issue is addressed.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dotancohen]

Clearly you've never worked in a major organization. Posting internal spreadsheets attached to bug reports?

No. He can post the formula to a new spreadsheet with dummy data. You are right that I've never worked in a major organization but I handle confidential documentation often. That has never stopped me from filing a bug.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

The last two sentences of the dotancohen's post already says that. :)

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[AmiMoJo]

I'll probably be modded a troll for saying this but OO lacks a British English dictionary for the spell checker, so it's not much good to me. That one missing feature makes OO impossible to deploy at a lot of companies and all educational establishments here.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[MBGMorden]

I believe it was 2.0 at the time. We haven't since revisited the idea, since after our initial decision we've purchased Office 2007 licenses for everyone so until there's a new version of Office to contemplate whether to upgrade to or not, I doubt we'll look at OOo again.

That's part of it too. OOo doesn't just have to beat the newest version of Office for us, but also needs to be worth moving not only new users but also all of our old users with valid Office licenses OFF of that product and to OOo (since the logistics and costs involved with supporting both just make for a nightmare).

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

@MBGMorden:
If your company was to switch to OpenOffice, it would have quite a few headaches doing that. Spreadsheets would need to be corrected / remade etc. But in the long run it would prove a good investment for your company. Indeed, switching to OpenOffice isn't "free", you'll have to pay for the time it will take for your employees to get used to it. But you'll pay much less than Microsoft Office AND it's future updates.

Also, you shouldn't try to switch instantly to OpenOffice. You should do it in the long term, give people an accommodation time in which they would be able to use both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, but be advised to use OpenOffice as much as possible.

Also, if you do this, it's one big step towards your company switching to Linux, which would be an even greater cost cut.

I think you should rethink whether the "hassle" is worth it or not. Just a personal opinion.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[MBGMorden]

Also, if you do this, it's one big step towards your company switching to Linux, which would be an even greater cost cut.

Unfortunately that's not in the cards for the foreseeable future. We're running far too many niche applications with no Linux/OSS equivalent at the time being. I'm having a hard enough time as it is convincing them to keep running Linux on the SERVER side where we can. The web team (despite my advice, but it's not my area so all I can give is advice) recently just migrated from Linux/Apache to Windows/IIS because they got a new coder who was all about ASP.NET (whereas most of our site had previously been done in PHP). My "portability" argument fell on deaf ears. In their minds Apache/Linux didn't support all the proprietary stuff that IIS did, so it was less of a system (in their minds) because of that.

Like I said - I try to push it where possible but I certainly do get "the look" that I mentioned when I try to suggest OSS for just about anything.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[JumpDrive]

Why would he file bug reports?

The problems may lead to multiple bug reports.
He has no control over when the bugs get fixed.
Therefore it can't be entered into his determination of whether it's a go or no go to use OO. If it isn't working, it isn't working.
Unless his job is to work with OO to make it work for them, then he just has to drop it and move on.
I had a similar issue with OO about 3 years ago. It wasn't a bug that caused not using OO, it was a lack of a feature and it was reported. Now we have all of the MS licenses and there is no incentive to look at OO now.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Bastard of Subhumani]

plot housing sales values in a given area for example in order to determine a proper per sq ft value for property there

What can you determine from zero?

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[MBGMorden]

If the question is serious, then generally if there were no (or very few) sales in an area then we assume the value is the same as it was during the last reassessment (when there hopefully were sales) and then adjust that value for inflation.

If a citizen disagrees (these values are used for property tax assessments) then they can always come in and contest the value - if they can show good proof that the house is overvalued (nobody seems to come in if we undervalue anything . . . ;)) then we'll adjust it down.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Carik]

Yup. And if the formatting of that MS Word file is complex enough, it won't be the same in both programs. THAT is the problem. For simple stuff, it's fine. For medium complexity stuff, it's almost always fine. Start throwing in complex equations and complicated formatting, and it starts breaking. Not a whole lot, but enough to make it incompatible for those uses.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[mad_clown]

You don't know anything about Openoffice, do you? It can open MS formats and save in them. Has done for years. I've set up a stack of disadvantaged students with Linux and OpenOffice and I have never had a complaint about OpenOffice. Ever.

I bought a used PowerBook from a friend a year or so ago, and it came with Office 2005 for Mac. I do most of my academic writing on that machine. My desktop machine at home is a Linux box, and I have OpenOffice on there.

I've noticed a lot of problems, mostly in formatting, when saving between the two. After I've worked on a document in OO and re-open it in Word, the footnotes are all screwed up (usually indented by a couple of tabs for no particular reason). Once, after saving in OO and re-opening in Word, all of my paragraph indents were missing. Tables are kind of dodgy at times.

Word is, overall, a nicer program. And that's not saying anything about some of the other software that's bundled with OO.org, almost none of which really hold a candle to their MS Office equivalents.

That's not to say I don't appreciate OO.org -- I do. It's wonderful having a full-functioned office suite that does what I need it to do most of the time and which I can use across multiple OS's free of charge.

But its not perfect and, given the choice between doing a project in OpenOffice and MS Office, I'll probably choose Microsoft's product.

That being said, I'm not ever likely to upgrade from the version of Office that came with my Powerbook. By contrast, I always keep up to date with what OpenOffice is doing and try out new versions whenever they're available.

I'd love to be able to switch 100%, but it's not quite there yet.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[LearnToSpell]

lawlz. There are serious bugs in OO.o that have been open for YEARS. I've given up on having anything get fixed in a timely manner. What's the upside to spending time creating thought-out, informative, reproducible bug reports only to have them sit there forever?

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[tepples]

Hello, OOo devs, when doing XYZ the program goes ABC but I was expecting DEF.

Hello, OOo devs, when trying to install this $6,000 Access+VBA app on OpenOffice.org Base, I expected the setup screen to appear, but nothing appears at all. What's the next step?

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[tepples]

It might Cost X amount of dollars to switch documents to work with OpenOffice

Your documents, or your documents and your suppliers' documents and your clients' documents? A lot of companies have done the math, and it'd be cheaper to keep paying Microsoft than to try to get their suppliers and clients to switch.

I'd get one of these guys who uses excel everyday with what he does, and see whether he can use OO for a week, from scratch though, don't import the older excel files

Can you also reasonably say "don't import the order files" about switching from Microsoft Office Access to OpenOffice.org Base?

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[Shados]

And "Y per year for the next decade" amounts to 2 hours of work of everyone using it in the company aside for the monkey answering the phone, and after a couple of thousand on the volume licensing agreement, then its flat fee, so anyone added is "free" (so to speak).

So you have to SERIOUSLY make it appealing, because if the average employee in our company loses an afternoon for whatever reason, on average, over sticking with office, we lost money on that decade.

So just the license fee is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. You have to show that on top of being free, Open Office is better overall, and over that decade, you'll never fall on a significant "This 3rd party integration would have worked in MS Office, but now with Open Office we have to roll up our own situation" situation (that isn't offset by one of MS Office's various issues, which I'll say, aren't nearly as common in 2007 than in 2003 and previous unusable pieces of shit...but then again, OOo wasn't there or mature enough then).

Open Office would be my first option for a small company or a startup. Once you get to 100-500 users and more, the licensing fee is fairly insignificant with volume licensing, so you really need to find that killer feature in Open Office to sell it. They're there in many cases, but not very well "advertised", so to speak.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dov_0]

Just out of curiosity, how did the OpenOffice Math package to as opposed to the spreadsheet application Calc?

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dotancohen]

> Why would he file bug reports?

To make the software better. It might now work for him today, but with the bug fixed it might work for him two years from now when the company is contemplating MS Office 2011.

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[dotancohen]

Post links and I will take the time to triage them. Thanks!

Re:Ummm....Nope.

[bingoUV]

Tools > Options > Language Settings > Languages > English (UK)

I tested it, seems to be working fine in Fedora's packaging of Open Office 3.0.1.

How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[Little_Professor]

These 'step by step instructions' consist merely of "Install wine" and then "install Microsoft Office from the CD" Blatant blogspam, not worthy of a place on the \. front page

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[kwalker]

Oh the irony...

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for this part: ./winetricks gdiplus riched20 riched30 msxml3 msxml4 msxml6 corefonts tahoma vb6run vcrun6 msi2

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[rmcd]

If Wine 1.1.9 permitted Office 2007 to completely work, IMO it would be newsworthy. But I am willing to bet that significant features in Office don't work. TFB doesn't discuss this.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[mrphoton]

I agree, it is trivial. Also I get a bit irritated thee days when people present a load of commands to type in. When in fact it is perfectly possible to do the install with the GUI these days. For seasoned linux users commands are quicker, but they are a real turn off for new users.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[imroy]

not worthy of a place on the \. front page

Backslashdot?

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[Anonymous Coward]

how much are you going to bet? A fool and his money, well, you'll find out how that goes.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[FearForWings]

It's the evil alternate reality /. where Microsoft can do no evil and Google has instituted a worldwide surveillance police state.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[Darkness404]

...But its a lot harder to screw up command line options. For example, editing fstab is a lot easier if you tell people to sudo gedit /etc/fstab compared to telling them to log in as root, going to their file browser (which could be a multitude of different things), clicking on their filesystem, going to etc, finding fstab and editing the file.

I tend to think of command line stuff as going via a direct URL. Sure, I can click Mail when I go to Google to bring up Gmail, but if you just type in mail.google.com it gets you to it a lot faster, and its a lot easier.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[erroneus]

Welcome to one of my user pet-peeves. Every time a user doesn't know the difference between a slash and a backslash, I get a little more annoyed. Every third time, I have to say "the one with the question mark above it" when I say slash and "not the one with the question mark" when I say backslash.

We get to thank Microsoft for feeling the need to differentiate DOS from CP/M so many years ago. Why oh WHY did they have to do that?

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be willing to be the features you consider significant, are not.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[dotancohen]

Except for this part: ./winetricks gdiplus riched20 riched30 msxml3 msxml4 msxml6 corefonts tahoma vb6run vcrun6 msi2

And the part where he links to a legal download of MSO from Microsoft servers:
http://www.programmerfish.com/free-direct-download-microsoft-office-2007

You do need a product key, though.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[mrphoton]

very true.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[lyml]

On my (swedish) keyboard layout, the one with the question mark is backslash and the one without it is slash :).

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[silent_artichoke]

I'd be willing to be the features you consider significant, are not to others.

Fixed that for you.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also I get a bit irritated thee days when people present a load of commands to type in. When in fact it is perfectly possible to do the install with the GUI these days.

Type in? Cut and paste more like - with virtually no scope for error.

Describing certain gui actions is a nightmare. Consider this (real example - I and a number of my colleagues had to do this recently due to space considerations):
a) Select Start-> Settings -> Control panel
b) Double click on 'system'
c) Select the 'advanced' tab
d) Where it says 'performance' click on 'settings'
e) Select the 'advanced' tab
f) Where it says 'virtual memory' click on 'change'
g) Click where it says 'C:', selecting this line
h) Click to the left of where it says 'no paging file' to select this option
i) Click on the 'set' button
j) Click where it says 'D:', selecting this line
k) Click to the left of where it says 'system managed size' to select this option
l) Click on the 'set' button
m) Click OK 3 times.
n) Reboot

This is how you move the pagefile from C: to D: on Windows XP. It's not too bad if you know roughly what you're doing; it's also not too bad if you're instructing someone while watching what they do. But if you're giving written intructions to someone with limited computer skills it's a recipe for failure.

I don't know if you can easily move the pagefile in Windows with the command line, but if you could it should take about 3 commands (create new file; switch to using new file; delete old file) possibly with a reboot before 'delete old' and the only thing the person being instructed needs to know is how to open a terminal and cut and paste 3 commands.
If anything goes wrong, you can get them to cut and paste the results back to you, and you can typically diagnose the problem. Try that with a gui: "It all seemed to work but nothing happened", "Oh , you meant *that* button", "I didn't see that so I clicked this instead", "I must have clicked on cancel by mistake" etc.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blatant blogspam, not worthy of a place on the \. front page

whats this \. you are referring to ?

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[Anonymous Coward]

the \. front page

I think you're confused about where you are.

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[johsve]

Uhumm isn't it \\ ?

Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose?

[hawk]

Because MS-DOS was a CP/M workalike, and CP/M adopted a DEC syntax which used / to designate command options.

Not a problem in directoryless CP/M and DOS 1.x, but by MS-DOS 2.0 the slavish backwards compatibility was already annoying problem.

Oh, early DOS *could* be configured to swap to different characters, but I think this is long gone.

hawk

Thank you, CS3 please?

[Slumdog]

For some reason all my attempts at running Office and CS3 failed on linux (I use fedora). Both gave similar errors so I assume you can install CS3 as well? Have you tried it?

Re:Thank you, CS3 please?

[mrphoton]

I had problems with office 2000 on fedora 8, but 2003 installed with out a problem. Never tried CS3 Also make sure you are up to date with wine as it develops so quickly.

Re:Thank you, CS3 please?

[Matt Perry]

CS3 appears to be supported just fine on Wine. Have you posted on the wine-users mailing list regarding the issues you are having running it?

Re:Thank you, CS3 please?

[Jamie's Nightmare]

He's talking about Photoshop CS3, not Counter Strike Source.

Re:Thank you, CS3 please?

[Matt Perry]

How do you know? I looked up Photoshop CS3 and learned that "CS3" is a version number. The company that makes Photoshop also has several other products with the same "CS3" version number. He could have also been talking about any of those. The original poster should have stated the actual product name to be clear.

Does not work with the latest wine

[Anonymous Coward]

Regression in wine 1.1.16 (still in 1.1.17) causes the office 2007 and office xp installers to bomb. This guide only works with older versions of wine.

Bug: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=17600

Re:Does not work with the latest wine

[l_bratch]

1.1.16 and 1.1.17 are a lot newer than 1.1.9.

Re:Does not work with the latest wine

[Anonymous Coward]

AC dumb fuck needs to learn how to read.

We can only assume that you were referring to yourself.

Re:Does not work with the latest wine

[advocate_one]

Regression in wine 1.1.16 (still in 1.1.17) causes the office 2007 and office xp installers to bomb.

this is the one big thing that p's me off with Wine... things that work on one version break on later ones... I've given up trying to get things to work with it... I keep a dedicated windows box for those few apps & games I need/play.

No

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Err...

[Jon.Laslow]

"...this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment..."

Linux + Office 2007 = all-Linux? What?

Re:Err...

[arotenbe]

Linux + Office 2007 = all-Linux?

Yes. Remember, as GNU fanatics like to say, Linux is just the kernel. "All-Linux" here refers to Linux on every computer the person uses.

Re:Err...

[Blakey Rat]

You know what me meant, don't be obtuse. Christ.

Re:Err...

[dotancohen]

That's not a troll. "All Linux" in the literal sense would mean nothing but Linux, so there's no Open Office either. I think the GP confused "all Linux" with "all open source" or more likely "no Microsoft".

Really, why?

[damn_registrars]

Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution

How could Office 2007's benefits possibly outweigh its costs and complications? This time MS has moved even further to break backwards-compatibility with earlier versions of office, which means you will find it even more difficult to share files with people you know who have older versions of the same.

And with the quality of the free office suites that can read and write the files of the previous versions without needing windows compatibility on non-windows systems, why even bother running the newest MS Office?

Re:Really, why?

[Bearhouse]

I hate MS office 07 with a passion, since I'd got so used to using the older version. Switching between older MS office versions and OO was, and still is, much less painless. There is some stuff cool new stuff in there, but most people will never use it.

Having said that, you can download a utility (free, from MS) that enables users of older versions of Office to access the newer files. Not that you should have to, of course.

The even better solution is to install OO3 on your clients/friends computers, since it opens MS2007 docs just fine.

Re:Really, why?

[Sun.Jedi]

For me, it's not about MSOffice. OOO is fine. Its about a mail client that works with Exchange, and Evolution isn't there yet.

I can't change my mail server, or its settings. I have no control over the mail server, or its gateways for that matter.

With the evolution-exchange package I can only connect via OWA, and thats horrible. Let's face it, even with IEx on a native Windows system, the Exchange OWA is horrible.

I don't think the wine tricks is the answer to my problem, but mail is really the last piece I need to fully convert (I run 2 desktops, 1 XP for mail, and 1 F10 for work.) to linux. Let me tell you when I have to capture text on one, and mail it ... I really hate life. Same for the other way around.

I have access to a site licensed CD of MSO2K7, and although I wont be using it aside from testing to see how it works, it's not a long term solution for me (and many others I'd assume). Evolution needs to get better. I'll wait.

Re:Really, why?

[Matt Perry]

why even bother running the newest MS Office?

Because of companies using SharePoint.

Re:Really, why?

[gknoy]

Usability, I guess. I'm not a frequent user of office-type tools, but when I use the new Office (excel or word), I find its handling of some things just a bit easier than in the older version of MS Office I normally use. When I go home and use OpenOffice, the differences in convenience are GLARING.

For example, deleting the contents of cells in OpenOffice Calc is significantly more annoying than in MS office (of any recent version). It sounds silly, but it's also really annoying, and if I had both on my system I'd be using Excel with no hesitation. If productivity is a concern, rather than merely cost, I feel like MS Office would win out. (I have no studies to cite, peer-reviewed of otherwise -- this is just my opinion.)

Re:Really, why?

[centuren]

For me, it's not about MSOffice. OOO is fine. Its about a mail client that works with Exchange, and Evolution isn't there yet.

I can't change my mail server, or its settings. I have no control over the mail server, or its gateways for that matter.

I don't know anything about Exchange, but I gather it's a mail server of some sort, but the foreboding sense I get when people talk about using it suggests to me it's somehow more. In fact, if it was a mail server in the manner to which I'm familiar, you could obviously check your mail using something else, or forward it to another address.

Despite that easy conclusion, I'm still confused. How did Microsoft manage to produce an email server-client solution that's only compatible with itself. It seems like making IIS only serve pages to IE, or MS Word only accept input from fantastic keyboards like the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000.

I suppose if one ignores that email has been standardized successfully for so long, the comparison can be made to instant messenger, where services developed their own protocols and stuck with them. Even so, it was never a big deal to write 3rd party clients that worked with them. What does Exchange do that's so different?

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This time MS has moved even further to break backwards-compatibility with earlier versions of office, which means you will find it even more difficult to share files with people you know who have older versions of the same.

Not true at all. You can save to different compatible version of office if you want (although if you use features introduced in newer versions, obviously you're formatting might get messed up) + there's an official free PDF exporter plugin (if you don't want to use the printer).

And with the quality of the free office suites that can read and write the files of the previous versions without needing windows compatibility on non-windows systems, why even bother running the newest MS Office?

Because the new Office UI actually improves my productivity (from someone who did the cold-turkey switch having over 10 years experience using the old UI). Despite all the bitching from people who have never used it, and people just switching from the old UI, if you give it half a chance it makes things a lot easier (for instance using styles properly is now a sinch).

Because I want to use something better than the mess that is OO. For anything slightly more complicated, it feels like OO starts to fight you & it's got the feel of Office 2000 or earlier (lessons they learned from & fixed in 2003 & later), and I'm talking from a usability perspective (not whether or not it's pretty).

There's plenty of valid issues & critiques to be made about Microsoft & its products. Office is now a very stable, fast, reliable, & secure piece of software that beats the pants off of the competition. The only real issue remaining is the slight vendor lock-in using Office entails (since OO does support the formats fairly well).

Free software is great & I use it now almost exclusively (except for booting into Windows for proper tablet support when I need it), but you have to be realistic as well - why do you think Linux has been gaining some more mainstream momentum the past year? Because there was a conscious effort to clean-up the UI & make it more appealing. OO could learn a thing or two (and perhaps make the transition easier by including a Office-compatible shortcut mapping)

* Caveat - when I refer to the Office suite, I'm referring to Word, Excel, & PowerPoint (and OneNote but it doesn't have any competition with respect to pen support). The other pieces don't have as big a following (with the exception of Outlook - but I think Goggle's web software provides a far better experience).

Re:Really, why?

[jacksinn]

I use Thunderbird at work on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine. Of all the mail clients I've tried on Ubuntu, this has worked out best for me for my specific needs which is basically hooking up to the corporate Exchange server. I wish it had a calendar (perhaps there is some sort of plugin or I'm missing something?) but I just use my Google calendar and have that displayed via my desktop date/clock bar.

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It does other important things - calendaring, appointments, whiteboard collaboration etc - and by all accounts actually does them well, across a whole organisation. For a lot of companies it's *the* app that precludes any possibility of switching from windows.

Re:Really, why?

[Ian Alexander]

Speaking as someone who reluctantly installed Office 2007 (Well, Office 2008, which is Office 2007 for Macs) recently I actually have to say I'm impressed with the way it treats compatibility with Office's older formats. If you save a file as an older document type like Office 97 or 2004 it runs compatibility checks on your content and everything to make sure you don't lose anything. I'd love to see that in OpenOffice, as opposed to the vaguely frightening dialog that basically tries to get you to save to ODF because that's the only format it's sure of.

Re:Really, why?

[jonwil]

Calling Exchange an email server is like calling EMACS a text editor.
Exchange does calenders (including shared calenders and options so others can see your calender), meetings, appointments and more.

What I want to know is, what is the difficulty in producing an outlook replacement on linux that speaks all the proprietary stuff. If people can reverse engineer MSN messenger, Office Document formats and all sorts of other proprietary MS junk, why cant people figure out Exchange? Or is there more to it? (fear of patent lawsuits perhaps?)

Re:Really, why?

[AceofSpades19]

Why don't you just use a virtual machine instead of 2 seperate computers?

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Synergy.

Re:Really, why?

[Yfrwlf]

The open source does-it-all collaborative suite programs like Exchange certainly need to be more competitive, but so far they are promising. So, maybe your Exchange-using organization should switch. Two "larger" looking ones I've found are:

Zarafa

Zimbra

Both were just a simple google search away. :P

As for an Exchange client solution, well...difficult, since Microsoft controls the communication interface for that and I doubt at this stage they are interested in freely playing nice with non-Microsoft clients. In that case, your best bet is to change the server.

I take that back, they may be getting enough pressure for playing nice with clients due to the whole .NET + Evolution thing, seems like they might be pushing for it a bit, since Evolution is somewhat working with Exchange. I can at least get email as well as see calendar events and get warnings about them, but sending emails I haven't tried very hard to figure out how to do. Hopefully the push for that isn't some sort of patent backstabbing deal though. Regardless, I'd rather not deal with that patent troll if I can help it and would instead ask for something that at least used standards so that you could use what client you wanted to. Microsoft doesn't know the meaning of the term "standard", plus, you know, there's the whole hatred for Linux and just trying to pull everyone onto their platforms thing so they can "collect at a later date" - Bill Gates.

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to have a look at Synergy for working across both systems. It can share the clipboard between them so you could copy something on the Linux box, and paste it into an email on the XP box.

Re:Really, why?

[walshy007]

The only real issue remaining is the slight vendor lock-in

have they resolved the whole 'the way your document looks when you print it is dependant on your printer drivers' thing? I know it was around in 2000 and pretty sure 2003, I know office isn't meant to be used for actual publishing or the like, however it's still something pretty major to be fixed.

Re:Really, why?

[jonbryce]

Office 2008 is much better than 2007 for basic stuff. Only problem is that it doesn't support VBA macros at all. You have to use Applescript for macros, and they don't work in Windows versions of Office.

For that reason I still have Office 2004 for when I get files with macros.

Re:Really, why?

[Bent Mind]

I'm not sure about Office 2008. However, with Office 2007, you have to be careful with the "Compatibility" mode. Saving in a 2003 format, Office will still save all of the 2007 features. As long as it's opened 2007, everything will look fine. However, when you open it in 2003, things can look really bad.

The gotcha is that you have no clue what the document will look like unless you open it in 2003. 2007 hides the changes it needs to make in order to maintain compatibility.

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, install synergy and be happy

Re:Really, why?

[bzzzt]

It's not a question of "speaking" the proprietary stuff, but also of interpreting it correctly and making sure the software acts on the data in a useful way. Calendaring is a difficult problem and not really interesting to the "typical OSS hacker".
There's progress being made though, see http://www.openchange.org/

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using Thunderbird to connect to an Exchange server, then the Exchange admins must have enabled IMAP access on the server. I believe that IMAP is not enabled by default in Exchange, though I could be wrong about that. In other words, you're lucky.

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

what is the difficulty

Answer in one link

Re:Really, why?

[Locklin]

But the GP was unable to send email from the Linux box. I find it hard to believe that Exchange doesn't allow imap (and LDAP?) access, or at least SMTP. Then again, what do I know, I'm in a cushy university where I can always SSH into the UNIX server and send mail through pine if all else fails.

Re:Really, why?

[jonwil]

Exchange does allow IMAP and other protocols. But, the exchange server admin has to turn them on. And many exchange server admins DON'T because there are security and other implications in doing so.

Although IANA MCSE so I dont know all the reasons why turning on IMAP etc would be bad or all the reasons why an exchange server admin would not want to turn them on.

Of course, for those who use Linux for most things but are forced into Outlook for email, the solution is to use either a VMWARE install running Outlook. Or better yet, run Outlook under WINE. Given the large number of people who only need Windows for access to their Outlook mailboxes/calendars/etc it seems logical that someone would be doing their best to keep it working under WINE (if not the WINE devs directly, then the Crossover Office people who have a business interest in making Outlook run as close to flawlessly as possible)

Re:Really, why?

[jacksinn]

I just checked and it is indeed IMAP.

Re:Really, why?

[silent_artichoke]

I realize this is anecdotal, but I get a MUCH better experience using Office 2007 in an XP Virtualbox session than I do using Wine. No crashing in VBox and very little slowdown. Wine crashes half the time, takes about a minute to start Word, and is so laggy that it is unusable. Very strange to me.

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, deleting the contents of cells in OpenOffice Calc is significantly more annoying than in MS office (of any recent version). It sounds silly, but it's also really annoying, and if I had both on my system I'd be using Excel with no hesitation.

I agree. Try using backspace instead of delete to see if that will fix your problem.

Re:Really, why?

[silent_artichoke]

The calendar plugin is Lightning. I do not believe it handles Exchange calendars. It will pull in your Google calendars though.

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

This time MS has moved even further to break backwards-compatibility with earlier versions of office, which means you will find it even more difficult to share files with people you know who have older versions of the same.

Not true at all. You can save to different compatible version of office if you want

Well, it's true that you can do that, but the problem is usually Joe in Marketing with more budget for the latest toys and fewer cares concerning the intellectual subtleties of document formats.

Joe will send a new format document to some high level manager still running Office N who won't be able to open Joe's version N+1 and will then complain to the CIO about how the IT system at the company sucks.

Just so you know.

Re:Really, why?

[7times9]

Stuck with Microsoft Outlook for work e-mail? Want access to your raw e-mail messages from Outlook? Prefer to use your own e-mail client rather than the clumsy Outlook client? If so, weboutlook is for you. weboutlook is a Python module that retrieves full, raw e-mails from Microsoft Outlook Web Access by screen scraping. It can do the following: * Log into a Microsoft Outlook Web Access account with a given username and password. * Retrieve all e-mail IDs from the first page of your Inbox. * Retrieve the full, raw source of the e-mail with a given ID. * Delete an e-mail with a given ID (technically, move it to the 'Deleted Items' folder).

Re:Really, why?

[JumpDrive]

This time MS has moved even further to break backwards-compatibility with earlier versions of office, which means you will find it even more difficult to share files with people you know who have older versions of the same.

Not true at all. You can save to different compatible version of office if you want (although if you use features introduced in newer versions, obviously you're formatting might get messed up) + there's an official free PDF exporter plugin (if you don't want to use the printer).

When you are truly sharing documents on the same file server though, you run into huge problems with document corruption. So much so in fact we had to start uninstalling Office 2007. Since we did this our problems have gone to having a document problem every 2 days, to once every 6 months.

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

um IMAP and thunderbird?

Re:Really, why?

[Anonymous Coward]

"What does Exchange do that's so different?"

Sitewide calendaring and contact management, MAPI mail connectivity and a small handful of other features. However, mail stored in Exchange can be accessed using standard protocols like any other mail server (MS calls these interfaces "connectors" and each one -- POP3, IMAP, etc. -- runs as a service) and can be accessed with any mail client. But it works best in a LAN environment with Outlook clients, as one might expect.

Re:Really, why?

[Sun.Jedi]

Not configured. I tried. They said they'd open a POP, I said um no, that'd be dumb.

Re:Really, why?

[Sun.Jedi]

And use an entire Wintel install? No thanks. ;)

The end-game solution is not to collaborate with with Windows OS and apps, its to REPLACE Windows OS and apps.

In reality, VMs are a viable solution. Thats partly why I jumped on the wine solution. I don't need all of MSOffice, just a coherent Outlook.

Re:Really, why?

[Sun.Jedi]

I peeked at the website. Very interesting... it seems to be a very cool workaround.

Thanks.

Executive summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Install wine

Get the winetricks script from http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
Use winetricks to get a bunch of dll files:
winetricks gdiplus riched20 riched30 msxml3 msxml4 msxml6 corefonts tahoma vb6run vcrun6 msi2

install MS Office

There. Was that so hard?

Re:Executive summary

[lordtoran]

That was definitely too hard. You expect me to copy and paste an entire command, when I could have written down the names and manually selected them from a user friendly GUI with 300 DLL files listed?

Re:Executive summary

[joelholdsworth]

I didn't have to do any of that when I installed it the other week - all I need was to switch riched20 into builtin, and it works straight off the CD.

Just confused

[Jon.Laslow]

Sorry, I'm used to coming on here and seeing a lot of posts re: why would you want to run anything from Microsoft on Linux? I made an ass of myself by assuming!

Re:Just confused

[digitalchinky]

No, you didn't, we all understood :-) You just got some ticked off noob with his 1 million + UID.

Vital instructions missing

[Bearhouse]

Of course, every /.er knows how to get *buntu.
For this strange thing called 'Microsoft Office' you can download for free here:
www.piratebay.org
Or if that gets /.ed, use the mirror at:
www.isohunt.com

More seriously, use OpenOffice if you can; it keeps getting better and better.

Re:Vital instructions missing

[compro01]

There's the small issue with OO.o 3.0 doesn't allow more than 65,536 rows (It must store the row count in a uint16) in a spreadsheet, but excel '07 will allow that, so you can't use OO.o in that instance.

Yes, if you're using that big a spreadsheet, you ought to use a database instead, but that's beside the point when I need to open that spreadsheet.

Still, I do like OO.o and it works quite well for 99% of tasks.

Re:Vital instructions missing

[tick-tock-atona]

Or Koffice.

Re:Vital instructions missing

[vrmlguy]

The second hit that Google turns up for "oo 65536 rows" is http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Calc/hacks/number_of_rows, which shows you how to increase the limits for both rows and columns and tells you what breaks if you do. At least one person has increased the limits to 2 000 000 rows and 32 000 columns, resulting in a bottom-right cell address of AUHT2000000.

Re:Vital instructions missing

[compro01]

What breaks includes the stated purpose in my post.

However, doing so implies that you don't save to any binary file format like Excel or whatsoever, otherwise you risk loss of data

Though apparently this is finally planned for 3.1.

If it requires instructions,

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not easy enough.

Re:If it requires instructions,

[fractoid]

If it is easy enough, it'll STILL require instructions for some people.

Wasn't this already possible?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was under the assumption that doing this was already possible using Crossover Office. I'm not sure if it would run Office 2007 but I'm pretty sure 2003 ran on it fine.

Why is this news?

Re:Wasn't this already possible?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I was under the assumption that doing this was already possible using Crossover Office. ... Why is this news?

Just guessing here:

Because Crossover Office is proprietary and contains compatibility hacks that (as far as I know) aren't in the Wine mainline?

Perhaps the news is that somebody else did a set of compatibility hacks and got it working.

Useful in a few situations

[77Punker]

I keep Windows software off of my Linux work environment in general, too. Unfortunately, my coworkers have a tendency to send me spreadsheets with more than 2^16 rows. This requires Office 2007. At least, it won't work on OOo 3 or Gnumeric.

Re:Useful in a few situations

[drummer42]

I keep Windows software off of my Linux work environment in general, too. Unfortunately, my coworkers have a tendency to send me spreadsheets with more than 2^16 rows. This requires Office 2007. At least, it won't work on OOo 3 or Gnumeric.

Its def useful!

Re:Useful in a few situations

[Anonymous Coward]

spreadsheets with more than 2^16 rows.

I would most likely commit suicide with a mouse cord if I had to deal with spreadsheets that large on a regular basis

Re:Useful in a few situations

[Yfrwlf]

That would be a very silly limitation for OOo to have, agreed, and one would think that would be an easy thing to fix, though that's definitely a big sheet...maybe someone should break things apart a little more.

Re:Useful in a few situations

[statusbar]

most likely these 'spreadsheets' are referred to by their creators as "databases".

--jeffk

Re:Useful in a few situations

[pmarini]

riiiight, and you liked cabbage as a kid...
if some of your colleagues regularly create a spreadsheet with that many rows, then they are doing it wrong... they need a different tool called Database...
they can't be possibly scrolling through that amount of data and another simpler alternative is to use a Linux JDBC/ODBC driver on the Excel spreadsheet:
- check this
- or someone suggested to write a control file and put it in oracle using sqlldr

What a gal really wants

[SpaghettiPattern]

"Wouldn't it be lovely to have a nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite to run on your Ubuntu Linux Distribution? For some people, this is the only thing that truly holds them back from an all-Linux environment ... But not anymore! We have compiled a nice, concise set of instructions to help guide you along."

Exactly what a gal really wants.

Except, I'm a bloke.

Re:What a gal really wants

[Anonymous Coward]

They have surgical procedures to fix that.

Re:What a gal really wants

[SpaghettiPattern]

They have surgical procedures to fix that.

Nah. I'd hate the rash and I'd have to update my wardrobe tastefully.

One Note

[iVasto]

The only reason I would want to run MS Office in linux is for MS OneNote. Believe it or not this is actually a great piece of software for students and there is no FOSS alternative that comes close. The closest competitor is Evernote which doesn't run natively on linux either.

Re:One Note

[jasager]

Believe it or not this is actually a great piece of software for students

i don't

and there is no FOSS alternative that comes close.

what about your filesystem?
echo "i don't need nicely colored icons" >> ~/insights.txt

Re:One Note

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree! that's actually the reason i wrote this article :)

Re:One Note

[Anonymous Coward]

Try zotero platform independant, OOo and MS office compatible. only depends on firefox

Just Say No

[SubaruStarship]

Teach your clients that it's OK to pass on the ribbon, the bloated system requirements, and above all, the enormous expense of Vole Office 2007! Give them the tools they need to combat peer pressure: OpenOffice, KOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.

Re:Just Say No

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, emacs and groff are all they really need.

Wake me up when Adobe suites run natively

[hwyhobo]

Most people I know suffer through MS Office only because the companies they work for force them to. That's why I run it on the company laptop.

On the other hand, when someone gets Adobe suites to run on Linux, I will sit up and listen.

Re:Wake me up when Adobe suites run natively

[dotancohen]

Did you write to Adobe and let them know that you are interested in Linux support? They won't do it if we don't express interest. Here's the Adobe contact page:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/contact.html

Screenshots on my blog: Easy with Crossover

[anothergeekrambling]

I have some screen shots on my blog for anyone who cares to check it out. Also working on a script to ease the installation of Mac4lin. http://anothergeekrambling.blogspot.com/ I've been able to run Word, Excel, Publisher, and One-note with no problems so far. I've experienced some file corruption with PowerPoint and have not been able to save files.

Want to win Friends for Linux and Open Source ??

[bmullan]

I read alot of the wise-cracks posted on this thread and those folks need to remember its NOT ABOUT YOU !! You may already use Linux and Open Office and other Open Source s/w ... the majority of the world does NOT. If you want to convince them to join you... then show them they can get to where you are and not lose what they already have & know. or... let Microsoft continue to brainwash them that "see linux doesn't work"

Far easier to just use a virtual machine

[pavelthesecond]

Just run XP in a virtual machine (such as VirtualBox which available for free from sun) and install office, and any other windows only apps, on to it. And then you don't need to worry about configuring wine and having the app crash because of some unsupported functionality. I've been doing that for office, winamp and a few other windows only apps for a few months now. In my experience, the apps inside the vm stay very responsive even when i have 2 or 3 vms running. And this is on an dual core amd 5600.

Re:Far easier to just use a virtual machine

[colinrichardday]

But doesn't that require having XP in the first place?

Re:Far easier to just use a virtual machine

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, a machine which is several times more powerful than what most people run office on. Also, what is so special about Winamp? It hasn't been any good since AOL bought it.

Re:Far easier to just use a virtual machine

[rantingkitten]

Why in god's name are you running Winamp in a VM? Just get audacious, which is almost the exact same thing, but comes with a few extras that make it nicer.

Re:Far easier to just use a virtual machine

[pavelthesecond]

Because ALL linux music apps SUCK (with respect to the things I use winamp for). I use Winamp mainly because of its media library and the ability to customize it (like a query language for defining custom views)! Also, I like the playlist editor concept. Songbird looks like a good potential alternative, but its still way too unstable and lacks lots of stuff I use in winamp. And for the record, I tried Amarok, Exaile, Rhythmbox, Songbird, and a few others I can't remember now. Have not tried audacious because last I checked it didn't have a media library.

Re:Far easier to just use a virtual machine

[rantingkitten]

Heh, okay. I just want to listen to some music. Enjoy your custom views, or something.

Re:Far easier to just use a virtual machine

[gadabyte]

gmusicbrowser is nice. might not be what you're looking for, but it's the only linux music app i'm happy with (and i've tried damn near 20 of 'em).

when i was running windows, i used foobar2k - winamp is about as customizable as a cinder block compared to foobar. the ability to customize is what led me to foobar, ending my long love affair with winamp. gmusicbrowser is the only potential replacement i've found for foobar (which works flawlessly in the several versions on wine i've tried it on).

Re:Far easier to just use a virtual machine

[pavelthesecond]

Thanks. That looks interesting and I'll give it a try.

Also wake me up when Adobe suites run natively

[MarkvW]

I'm with you. I'm done with Windows when I can run all the Adobe movie/music/photo editing software in Linux.

I noticed that Adobe has been using some Qt also (for Photoshop Album). I wonder if that portends anything . . .

OpenOffice devs raise hands

[amn108]

As if millions of OpenOffice developers have cried out in terror "So, why have we've been developing OpenOffice for these last 10-15 years?!" and were suddenly silenced...

Ubuntu isn't the only Linux distribution.

[Anonymous Coward]

It annoys me how TFA singles out Ubuntu. This process should work for any Linux distribution.

I stopped wanting Office a long time ago, I just use Open Office for everything now and if I really needed MS Office I would run a virtual machine so that way I don't have any MS crap floating around nice Linux system.

OTOH, this article does give people a more up-to-date view of what Wine has become. People are saying "when I used it it couldn't do X" - well when was the last time you used it? "About 5 years ago -" well no bloody wonder why it sucked!

Crossover

[jadedoto]

For those of us who took advantage of the Lame Duck Challenge...

I have Photoshop CS2, Dreamweaver CS2 and MS Office 07 running flawlessly in Crossover.

Re:Crossover

[Anonymous Coward]

And I have GIMP, Kompozer, and OO running flawlessly without emulation, what's your point?

Re:Crossover

[jonaskoelker]

I have Photoshop CS2, Dreamweaver CS2 and MS Office 07 running

Ouch. I feel sorry for you.

Re:Crossover

[Anonymous Coward]

And I have GIMP, Kompozer, and OO running flawlessly without emulation,

I guess his point is that Wine Is Not an Emulator

Nice TrrooolllRY!

xtracto

Re:Crossover

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us who took advantage of the Lame Duck Challenge...

I have Photoshop CS2, Dreamweaver CS2 and MS Office 07 running flawlessly in Crossover.

How about CS4?

Sanity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for the only sane comment.

Crossover has been doing this for awhile now

[wangmaster]

Crossover has been doing this for a while now. I've been running Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003, and Office 2007 under it for work. I even purchased crossover myself to use at work because of their awesome licence policy basically saying:
        a. run the Software on any computer, so long as no more than one person per license is ever using the Software at any one time.

Otherwise, these guys provide a great service to the linux community with their work on wine, and their prices are very reasonable. I can't stress enough how worth it I think giving these guys money so that I can do much of my work in a Linux world and do it easily without having to jump through the hoops of dealing with a straight Wine configuration.

Re:Crossover has been doing this for awhile now

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, Crossover is used at my school in a bunch of computer labs with RHEL5. Not that I use it much (or at all, LaTeX FTW), but it seems to work pretty much flawlessly. It took me a while to figure out that my school wasn't getting some magic native Linux build of the MS Office suite.

Re:More proof

[lordtoran]

Put down the crack pipe and get some sleep.

Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite rnning on Ubuntu

[falconwolf]

I'll stick with OpenOffice thanks.

Some people need MS Office. Last I hear OO.org doesn't handle some MS Office macros and because most people use it others need that capability. Use the tool that gets the job done.

Falcon

Re:Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite rnning on Ubuntu

[Carik]

It's not just the macros. I do IT support for a chemistry department at a large university, and OO.o just doesn't do the math, even at the undergrad level. If your assignment is to create a spreadsheet with all your results data, have it do some calculations, then draw a graph, you're pretty much stuck with MS Office. We tried OO.o in our lab -- it would have saved the department something like a grand -- and we had to put MS Office back on after a week, because no one could do their homework.

Re:Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite rnning on Ubuntu

[dov_0]

The latest version of OpenOffice has cleaned up a lot of things and added features. A test with a couple of 'switched on' students could be useful. Switching the whole lab over at once could be a bit of a disaster as there are some differences in the way OpenOffice does things.

Re:Microsoft's Office 2007 Suite rnning on Ubuntu

[hey!]

Can't do the math? I find that a bit hard to believe. It seems more likely that the students can't download solutions to their homework.

One thing I could believe is that OO doesn't produced proper scientific graphs. I wouldn't use either OO or MS Office for this these days, but this used to be true of MS Office as well. Perspective pie chart? No problem. Errors bars? What are those? If MS Office has subsequently acquired those features but OOo doesn't have them, then clearly MSO would be more usable for student lab work.

Quickbooks

[falconwolf]

I strongly suspect that the number of people who need features present in Office 2007 but not in OOo 3.x is a lot less than the number of people locked into WIndows because of Quickbooks.

You're not locked into Windows if you need Quickbooks. Intuit also as a version for Macs. And it's universal, it runs on both PowerPC and Intel Macs.

Falcon

Office 2007 on Wine OpenSolaris

[Anonymous Coward]

Already had this running on OpenSolaris last year...

http://synesius.wordpress.com/2008/11/24/microsoft-office-2007-on-opensolaris-200811-rc2/

Microsoft Windows -- still a joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft aren't doing themselves any favors. I did a small windows network install today (rare I'm a unix guy) and it was a nightmare. Server 2008 is a step in the right direction, in as much as Microsoft have very nearly finished reinventing unix, as the saying goes -- badly.

It's not all bad, some of it is very bad indeed. I get the impression MS are using 'security' to justify locking third parties out now. Several apps needed to be upgraded (at great cost) to run properly on MS new OS line-up, and the Windows GUI's and Wizards are all over the place. With RDP, Wine and virtualization software, we're fast approaching the point where the best way to install Windows software is on linux or mac.

Why???

[GomezAdams]

This is like buying an iPhone. Why? I've been successfully creating and/or exchanging M$ Office format documents with MS Windows users using OOo for many years. The Redmond Encumbered Ones never know unless I tell them.

Better yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

or just install Windows. ubuntu's for sissies anyway.

But I guess you'd still get props from all of your 1Ee7 haxor friends for using ubuntu and having office 07

well, who cares

[ooocmyooo]

who the hell needs that on linux?

me not, thanks anyway.

Re:well, who cares

[dotancohen]

who the hell needs that on linux?

I do. I happen to communicate with people who use MS Office. By "use" I mean "type an email in Word and send it as an email attachment". I'm going to become rich and famous after I invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet.

Re:Want to win Friends for Linux and Open Source ?

[ooocmyooo]

well, who needs brainwashed people using ms office on linux not understanding a damn thing about the system???

this is imho not a good way.
to teach my grandmother how to write on computers i'd start with gedit maybe, go over to abiword, if she needs more give her open office and if she becomes a geek then and needs still more i'd give latex to her.

:P

Re:More proof

[V!NCENT]

I fail to see why Linux isn't ready for the desktop. The only problem I see is that we're in a OS multiverse, that has a parallel Windows and Linux universe, both with the same (read serious real world) functionalities, but not realy good traveling tunnels between them.

Ofcourse that's being worked on, but sadly only on one side; the Linux universe. The Windows universe just tries to fsck everything up.
So much for the balance of creating and destroying...

But does it update? What about OGA / WGA?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you can run stuff under WINE or whatever, but usually my experience with Micro$oft's idiocy is that many of their update and add-on web pages and functions are intentionally crippled if you aren't running under a M$ Windows OS and MSIE browser.

Specifically you can't click more than about one link at the office.microsoft.com to look for 'free' updates, templates, converters, or whatever without getting hit in the face with an "Office Genuiue [dis]advantage" check that wants to use ActiveX crap in MSID to run WGA/OGA checks that your OS and Office version are all "genuine microsoft software" and "activated".
Last time I checked, LINUX / WINE might not pass WGA/OGA checks, though I'd be delighted to hear that I'm wrong and that you can access updates and 'free' templates / add-ons et. al. from their online sites from a LINUX PC running, say, Firefox + WINE + MSO2007.

Actually their whole WGA/OGA thing is enough of an annoyance to me that I rarely even run Windows or MS Office 2007 since AFAIK their "activation" checks usually barf when you try to do something like switch a given OS / Office instance between running on one dual-booted OS partition or another [e.g. XP vs Vista, Vista vs. Linux] or in vs. out of a VM.

I own Vista and MS Office 2007, but if it is going to be a pain in the arse to actually run the things without having them continually refuse to update / access online free add-on resources or keep activated as "genuine" despite me choosing to dual / triple boot between running my instance in either LINIX, XP alternate boot on the same PC, or Vista alternate boot on the same PC, or in a VM hosted on the same PC, it isn't really meeting my needs. I'd love to run LINUX full time, but various broken applications [e.g. most any video game] don't let me do that 100% of the time. I'd love to run Vista 64 either in a VM or as an alternate dual-boot partition when I can't run just LINUX, but various software breaks running on it as well as LINUX, and sometimes the VM performance of it just isn't adequate. So hence sometimes I'll boot into my copy of XP on the same box, and of course I expect to be able to run all my owned applications like MS Office, et. al. no matter which scenario is in effect at the moment (a pretty reasonable expectation for the same actual machine, I think). Yet between all the registry stuff, "non portable applications" issues, filesystem incompatibilities, and WGA/OGA I don't find a way to do it without major hassle and inability to access my files/applications properly 90% of the time when I'm natively running LINUX.

Hence usually I just say "screw Microsoft" and don't even try to use MS Office / Vista / XP and do everything possible under native UNIX tools so at least I can have it all work transparently in or out of a VM, on one LINUX host PC vs another, et. al.

The closest I've come to having trouble free use of MS Office et. al. under LINUX is to run say XP or Vista in a VM and just ONLY run it that way. That gets to be a problem though since it isn't uncommon for the VM or software activation stuff to break every few months when a new version of the VM software comes out. Also sometimes it is just too slow running in a VM, and sound / advanced graphics [DirectX / OpenGL] never works well in the VM either.

If I could transparently / conveniently switch without problem the same "installation" from running either in a VM or under an alternate boot OS image, that'd work for me about 95% of the time.

Frankly I think they need to hurry up with virtualizing GPU and PCI/DMA resources and then just run EVERY OS or even EVERY application in a VM 100% of the time with high performance and then you'd be able to just analogously "alt-tab" switch between LINUX, Vista, XP, whatever, and have no real performance or reliability problems doing so.

Huh?

[IrquiM]

Didn't we run MS Office in Linux via Wine like 10 years ago? I admit that it was a bit slow to start as I didn't have the most powerful PC around back then, but it did work! So, where's the news?

Re:Want to win Friends for Linux and Open Source ?

[A12m0v]

Just introduce her to Emacs and Lisp.

Office 2007 on Gentoo

[agravier]

If you are running a ~x86 Gentoo, you have to downgrade to Wine 1.1.12 because there is a bug that prevents the installer from running on 1.1.17 sudo paludis -i wine=1.1.12 The no need for all the winetricks, also...

Re:Office 2007 on Gentoo

[agravier]

ok.. I try again with some formatting and without the typos:
If you are running a ~x86 Gentoo, you have to downgrade to Wine 1.1.12 because there is a bug that prevents the installer from running on 1.1.17:
sudo paludis -i =wine-1.1.12
There is no need for all the winetricks, also...

nice, clean installation of Microsoft's Office

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me up to that sentence.

Running Linux

[Eddy Luten]

I think the other (maybe more obvious) thing that's holding people back is having to type crap into a command line console to get anything working properly.

Re:Running Linux

[IRWolfie-]

have you ever seen instructions that use a GUI? They are filled with screenshots of every menu and where to click. (and then the gui isnt consistent between versions of a product/os) command line instructions only need a short few consise instructions. open terminal-> enter this-> press enter If anything using a gui is harder (Ive spent ages in windows previously looking for some sound options)

Re:Running Linux

[Eddy Luten]

Are you honestly trying to tell me that you adjust the balance and volume of your computer through a CLI?

Regardless, we're talking about people who would be migrating from Windows to Linux who, in all respect, mostly aren't power users and shouldn't even have to know about sudo or command line interfaces.

Re:Running Linux

[IRWolfie-]

Are you honestly trying to tell me that you adjust the balance and volume of your computer through a CLI?

yes, with alsamixer

Slashes vs Backslashes

[chris-chittleborough]

CP/M took lots of inspiration from RT-11. DEC's command-language interpreters used "/" to denote options. (BTW, the CLI did this sort of parsing, not the command itself.) When the microcomputer took off, DEC was very popular so command syntaxes like "delete/confirm *.txt" or even "pip goodname.c=badname.c/r" seemed natural.

When directory-structured filesystems for microcomputers first appeared, there were two popular syntaxes for pathnames. Unix uses good old "dir1/dir2/file". DEC's high-end OSes used "[dir1.dir2]file" -- yuck. Apparently "dir1\dir2\file" was the closest anyone could get to the Unix syntax without introducing backward compatibility problems. I for one would have preferred the loss of backward compatibility.

Re:Slashes vs Backslashes

[spitzak]

For MSDOS 2 Microsoft made both slash and backslash work. This seems reasonable so that you could run old command-line programs and type something in that would get past their assumption that '/' started switches and should be parsed out.

This is all perfectly reasonable.

However after MSDOS 2 Microsoft went downhill fast, becoming exactly what everybody here hates. It would have been *TRIVIAL* to make all the new software prefer slash. But some arrogant asshole there realized that this would make it easier to port Unix software back & forth and thus possibly harm their lock-in, and we got the shit they are producing now.

Actually this backfired. I'm pretty certain that if NT was a Unix clone with Windows GUI, there would be no Linux, as a vast number of people, including me, would probably have happily used it.

I Disagree Somewhat

[wonkavader]

"As much as I hate Microsoft's operating system, their office suite is pretty decent."

I agree with a modified version of that sentence:

"As much as I hate Microsoft's operating system, their office suite USED TO BE pretty decent."

The latest one is a painfully bad idea. The menus are awful. Logic left the building on the whole suite.

Excel hasn't been good for years, which is a shame, because it was an AMAZINGLY good spreadsheet in it's early days -- intuitive, fast, light and intelligent.

Furthermore, most of the older Office versions weren't pleasant when they were released. Machine had to Moore's Law up to them for about one doubling before they were snappy enough to like.

Using Office 97, I was happy with Word. I was already favoring other, simpler spreadsheets over Excel.

I've been using the latest Office for at least six months, now. My company upgraded. Sigh. It's enough to drive you to OpenOffice.

Word's insane, Excel's so loaded with crap you can't do the simple things you used to be able to do trivially and quickly, and Visio's a COMPLETE DOG.

Outlook seems like it would be good enough if it weren't bound to Exchange, but I think that's a whole 'nother topic.

Re:I Disagree Somewhat

[JShadow]

My company analyzed Office 2007 briefly when it first came out, management decided to boycott it as long as possible. They were appalled at the total lack of anything familiar to them, which basically made doing basic daily tasks 3 times harder. So we're sticking with office 2003, the last good version of the Office suite. Perhaps Office 2009 will be better...? Unlikely.

Once OpenOffice 3.1 is rolled out I plan on making a case that we move to it, since Office 2003 licenses aren't going to be available forever.

misguided agressions

[brockomatic]

I've read most the comments in this article and find a lot of linux people sounding like apple people. I use openoffice, BUT at the end of the day, openoffice really isn't office 2007 and when trying to be used for more then 'average' office duties, it falls seriously short. They are more like general tools to use for people with simple job needs. Also, along the same lines, GIMP is not photoshop nor is OO.o draw/inkscape = to illustrator. They may work for a percentage of users, but when you get down to it, they are a) lacking in features b) lacking in over a decade of R&D (i'm not including StarOffice years). Yes, microsoft/adobe's programs are bloated and I'm not going to make excuses for this, but they are serious tools that have been used in work environments for a long time. In the case of word and photoshop, they've been around longer then linux kernel 1.0.0 has. Just because you don't like a company, it doesn't make their tools bad. Using their tools doesn't make you any less a linux user/lover/etc.

No OpenFormula

[tepples]

Did you see the piece of crap MS put together for their OOXML "standard"? It's an order of magnitude longer than ODF

It has to be larger: it has a larger scope. Where OOXML (ISO/IEC 29500) specifies a spreadsheet formula language, OpenDocument (ISO/IEC 26300) defers to a yet-to-be-produced document that eventually became the OpenFormula draft. But I agree with your basic premise that the extra things in OOXML shouldn't justify a factor of ten size difference.

Word Viewer

[tepples]

And people who are writing essays, and need to submit them, correctly formatted, to a professional publication that requires submission in MS Word format.

Would Wine + Word Viewer + OpenOffice.org Writer work?

Nice trick

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats a cool trick, but it would be even cooler if you could get Linux to run inside MS Office 2007.

One huge hole in oocalc

[hawk]

I had elaborate sets of spreadsheets that linked by name to cells or regions external documents. I had to combine them as sheets in a single document to get them to work in oocalc. I was more than slightly annoyed . . .

hawk