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Microsoft Office 2007 In Linux With WINE

Posted by timothy on from the drink-the-wine-but-not-the-kool-aid dept.

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."

19 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Ummm....Nope. by JustNiz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >> 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.

    1. Re:Ummm....Nope. by whoever57 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
    2. Re:Ummm....Nope. by MBGMorden · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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
    3. Re:Ummm....Nope. by dotancohen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
    4. Re:Ummm....Nope. by dotancohen · · Score: 3, Insightful

      ...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.

      --
      It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
    5. Re:Ummm....Nope. by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  2. How on earth did this get past the Firehose? by Little_Professor · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:How on earth did this get past the Firehose? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  3. Does not work with the latest wine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

    1. Re:Does not work with the latest wine by l_bratch · · Score: 3, Informative

      1.1.16 and 1.1.17 are a lot newer than 1.1.9.

  4. Err... by Jon.Laslow · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    Linux + Office 2007 = all-Linux? What?

  5. Really, why? by damn_registrars · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:Really, why? by Sun.Jedi · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Really, why? by gknoy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.)

    3. Re:Really, why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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).

    4. Re:Really, why? by Ian+Alexander · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Really, why? by Bent+Mind · · Score: 3, Informative

      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/
  6. Executive summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  7. Crossover by jadedoto · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.