wine and excel 97
 

i installed excel 97 using wine to use for very specific tasks where neither Calc nor Gnumeric met my satisfaction.

Install went fine, but when I run excel, the splash comes up but doesn't go away, and the main window comes up with this error message that I can't get past:
MSCREATE.DIR cannot be accessed. The file may be read only, or you may be trying to access a read-only location. Or, the server where the document is found may not be responding.

The following is outputted to the console, but does not seem significant:
fixme:ole:CoRegisterMessageFilter stub
fixme:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance Untranslated charset 255
fixme:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance just using first face for now
fixme:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance Untranslated charset 255
fixme:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance just using first face for now
fixme:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance Untranslated charset 255
fixme:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance just using first face for now
fixme:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance Untranslated charset 255
fixme:font:WineEngCreateFontInstance just using first face for now


I made the mscreate.dir in the top excel directory writeable, still no luck. Reinstalled dcom95 as instructed by some website, no luck.

Thanks in advance.

just to be sure, did you check open office? www.openoffice.org
or star office? www.sun.com

have you edited your wineconfig file and made sure that the wine dirs are writable?
do you have a set of windows fonts? (copied from a winbox to wine's c/windows/fonts)