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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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?

[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: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.

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.

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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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?

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

[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.

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

[statusbar]

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

--jeffk

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.

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

[jonaskoelker]

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

Ouch. I feel sorry for you.

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.

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)

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.