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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."
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
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
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?
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.
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
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.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
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.
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.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
"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.
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.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time