I am trying to install microsoft office (after openoffice #@$^&* up some documents' formats) and I am having a tremendous difficulty getting either wine or winex to work with something as simple as MS Word. The error that I'm getting is this:

"Please wait while setup updates the Windows Installer on your system"
and
"installing this product requires windows installer"
and
"an error occurred when installing or upgrading the windows installer on your system"

It then trys to "update" itself and then crashes. Has anyone encoutered this because I can't seem to find anything here in the forums on this specific subject. Thanks in advance.

I am not sure that you can use Microsoft Office with Wine yet.

There is a company called "Code Weavers" that sells a product called CrossOver Office. Their web site is http://www.codeweavers.com/
It is an extension to Wine that has additional software to support Microsoft Office. I tried this and was able to install Office 97. It costs $40. The only problem I found was it would not display the help for Office applications. That may have been a problem with my Linux installation, as they claim that it will support help in Office.

Which OpenOffice were you using?

openoffice 2.0 beta. I copied a file over to my mac and opened it with Word. To my surprise, I learned that I had faxed my resume to two different potential employers with formatting issues. Regardless, I would really like to use MS' office suite to avoid any future embarracements. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I just have to add that if it wasn't for forums like these on linux, I would still be at the mercy of a troubled OS....no wait, I jumped to apple years ago. There are always options. Thanx again everyone.

Well, the name states Beta so you can expect errors. Use stable software for tasks you want to be sure to work. OpenOffice2 has become stable so those formatting issues should be in the past.

I just installed Crossover Office 5.0 from Code Weavers. I successfully installed and am running Microsoft Office 2003. The embedded help works great. Crossover Office costs $40 from codeweavers.com. Installing the Crossover Office was simple. Then installing MS Office 2003 into Crossover Office was almost as simple. It automatically added entries into my KDE application menu for itself and for the MS Office applications. Easy as can be.

I have also recently installed and am running Open Office 2.0.1. It is running great as well. It can open genuine Excel files with no problems. I haven't tested the word processor on genuine MS Word document files yet. I am using the OOo word processor to create business cards. It's taking a little time to get used to it. I've never been much of an office suite guru. So far the business card project looks promising.

Let's not forget about other excellent FOSS office applications. I have a very high regard for Koffice and for Abiword and Gnumeric.