MS Office apps
 

HI,:scratch:
I am a novice and this is my first inquiry. I have Ubuntu and also I run a MS Win machine. My question is; Can I run MS Office apps on Ubuntu? AND ca I run the UBUNTU Office apps on Windows? I haven't used any command prompts in years for any app. So to add to my inquiry, If these apps will run on the opposite OS's is it difficult to do? Is there any amjor changes that need to be performed for either ap, MS Win/UBUNTU?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Pukka10:confused:

A colleague of mine managed to get Microsoft Office Pro working on Ubuntu using Wine (a windows api environment). I've never setup wine myself. I just use OpenOffice on linux and MS Office on Windows. There is an OpenOffice port for Windows that works well. So you could just ditch MS Office and use OpenOffice across the board unless you're a power user. I would say OpenOffice has about 90% of the functionality of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Not sure about Access, but there is a database program for OpenOffice.

The answer is no - you can not run MS programs natively on Linux and Linux programs can not run in Windows.

To run MS Office apps in Linux you need Wine or CrossOffice (these two are emulators that run in Linux). I heard they are difficult to get configured properly, I've never used either myself. The other option is to use applications that are cross platform. OpenOffice has been mentioned - that's actually the only one I can think of.

CodeWeaver's Crossover office is proprietary, and is an improved version of WINE.
Wine is open souce, but doesn't run all programs easily. Its kind of a toss up.

I've heard of some programs on sourceforge trying to get linux apps to run on windows well, and I'll try to find some here in a minute.

Crossover Office
WINE
Sourceforge

Also, you could run linux in an emulator on windows if you wanted to run the programs, as I said in a different thread there is Qemu-DSL (http://gulus.usherbrooke.ca/pub/dist...1-embedded.zip)
Or some other such program.

Just note however that this is generally the same as trying to run mac apps on windows or windows apps on mac, except a little more futile than that.

I personally advise switching to OpenOffice.Org but if you can't do that, I'd say crossover office is your best bet.

What are the "Ubuntu office apps"?

As far as I know the main office apps in Ubuntu are OpenOffice.org, which runs on most systems.

Thanks to you all. Looks like a little more trial and error is in the making.
Thanks again.
Pukka

I have some Access 2000 Applications (the DB of MS Office 2000) which I had to run under Linux.
There are basically two approaches

1) Have a virtual machine SW like VMWARE install on Ubuntu, but at the moment VMware says that the Ubuntu support is only experimental (it works nicely on Suse Linux, Fedora, NMandriva etc)
The install Windows and MS Office. I had a quite complex Access application running without big problems, only a factor 2 performance penalty.

2) Use some SW that maps the Windows OS calls to Linux. As mentioned tehre are several approaches as well. Wine is open source, they have released a new version that may be worth testing.
Crossover is a commercial implementation of Wine, now coming out 6.0 Beta version. Win4Lin is another approach. With this second approach you are getting better performance but the mapping is not 100% I had Word Excel and Powerpoint run fine on Crossover, but never managed Access to run completely.
Win4Lin is advertised as beeing very good, but I never managed to get it running, and support is certainly not their first priority.

All in all:
If you can pay the 50% performance toll, go for VMWare (as soon as Ubuntu is supported) your life wilkl be easier and you can finally concentrate on doing your work instead of fighting against the wind mills.

Massimo