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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain