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.

[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.

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

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

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?

[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).

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?