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I'm hoping someone can offer some real-life experience of using MSOffice 2003 (particularly Word and Excel) on Linux via either Crossover Office or Wine or some other method.
Before I'm shouted at, the reason is that I occasionally want to work at home, and Open Office (though good) is not sufficiently compatible (especially Word styles/formatting, Excel charts and of course macros). I can get a home-use Office 2003 licence cheaply through work but I do not have WinXP at home, so thought Crossover might be a good idea.
System is SimplyMEPIS 3.3.1 with kernel 2.6.10 (and Win98 on another partition), 1.8Ghz PC with 512MB ram.
The Crossover site gives Word and Excel a "Bronze" star meaning there are some problems - but doesn't say what the problems are!
Before I stump up for crossover and the Office licence, are there people out there using this successfully, or is it a non-starter for the moment?
Crossover Office does a poor job of running Microsoft Office. I tried it last year after waiting several months for the current version of Crossover Office to be released. One of my favorite things to do in Microsoft Office is to create a calendar in Word. I found that Crossover Office would not run the wizard. Also I have a collection of Excel spreadsheets. I couldn't open them properly in Excel under Crossover Office. If you go to the Crossover Office web site and look up Microsoft Office in their supported applications database you will see that it is rated at bronze level support. You can get Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to start but you may not be able to use various functions.
Wine is probably no better. Codeweavers, the creators of Crossover Office, codevelop Wine and Crossover Office in the same way that Sun Microsystems codevelops Star Office and Open Office dot org office suites. It wouldn't hurt to try it. You can download Crossover Office and run it for thirty days without a license. That should be enough time to see if it is good enough.
Last edited by stress_junkie; 10-21-2006 at 10:07 AM.
Wine is probably no better. Codeweavers, the creators of Crossover Office, codevelop Wine and Crossover Office in the same way that Sun Microsystems codevelops Star Office and Open Office dot org office suites.
This is completely wrong. Codeweavers do not codevelop wine in the same way that sun do with star office. Codeweavers have nothing to do with wine officially. They make alterations to the stock wine code and have made a GUI to allow easy installation of apps.
Thankyou Stress Junkie and Sickboy for your replies. Looks like I'll have to put my plan on hold for the time being, then.
Sickboy - it's useful to know that Office 2000 works, I'll bear it in mind, thanks. But the home-use licence only applies for the same version we have at work, which is 2003.
Its possiable to get Office 97, 2000 and 2003 to install and run in Wine. Office XP is a major pain and Office 2007 will start to install, but it has always crashed on me
I have Crossover office 5.0.3, and I've run Office 2000 successfully (I use excel and word almost daily). I've tried installing Office 2003 as well, but it has not worked out.
Crossover has a support table on their website and I think it confirms the fact that Office 2000 is well supported and 2003 not so well.
Crossover is still a good product to have if you want to run Windows apps. I don't regret paying $30 to them..
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