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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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]

...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.

[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.

Err...

[Jon.Laslow]

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

Linux + Office 2007 = all-Linux? What?

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?

[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?

[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).

If it requires instructions,

[Anonymous Coward]

it's not easy enough.

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?

[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:Useful in a few situations

[statusbar]

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

--jeffk

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)