Would Office 2007 work with Wine?

Pandemic187 · 03-25-2007, 11:45 PM

I guess I'm still pretty noob-ish when it comes to Linux, and I was just wondering this. It would be pretty cool to just use Linux and ditch Winblows (hehe) entirely, but I bought Office 2007 and it would be a shame to waste. So, I was just wondering if it would be at all possible to install Office 2007 via Wine.

conn-fused · 03-26-2007, 04:42 AM

The honest answer is, I'm not sure, but I don't see why not. Older versions can certainly be run successfully under wine, and the commercial program Crossover Office, which is built on wine, has flawless support for older versions of MSOffice. You might want to look at the Crossover site to see what, if anything is said about compatibility with Office 2007.
http://www.codeweavers.com/

pwc101 · 03-26-2007, 05:30 AM

If you desperately wanted to still use Office, you could install XP into a virtual machine (such as VirtualBox - which is excellent, in my honest opinion) and then install office into that. It'd be quite a lot more resource intensive, but it'd definitely run without a single hitch.

Just something to consider.

edit: added URL

1kyle · 03-26-2007, 07:54 AM

I doubt whether office 2007 would work with WINE.
If you need Windows try vmware / parallels and then run it "Natively" in a Windows VM.

You could also try Cross Over Office as they seem really good at getting a lot of Windows apps to work on Windows.

For my part I find Open Office suffices for 95% of stuff I used to use M$ Office for.

EXCEL seems to (for me) possibly present the biggest challenge to switcvhing completely to Open Office.

Cheers

-K

Pandemic187 · 03-26-2007, 08:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pwc101

It'd be quite a lot more resource intensive, but it'd definitely run without a single hitch.

That sounds good. I'm not too worried about resources. Of course I do realize that one of the reasons to use Linux in the first place is to stray away from MS software, but Office 2007 is pretty nice, IMO - both in its interface and in terms of usability.

Thanks for the suggestion though. I'm a n00b and couldn't get my wireless card to work with Debian Etch, so I'm going to install Kubuntu Fiesty later - I tried the live CD and my wireless connection works flawlessly, plus the interface is amazing. Too bad it's still a beta, but it seemed stable enough. Anyway, I'll try VirutalBox when I intall that.

pwc101 · 03-26-2007, 08:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pandemic187

Anyway, I'll try VirutalBox when I intall that.

Make sure you read their documentation (which is excellent) as you don't install it as you do other apps (although you can compile it from source). Once it's installed though, it works like a charm - so much so in fact, that I've recently (yesterday!) ditched my triple boot (XP - Ubuntu - Slackware) for just a dual boot (XP - Slackware) since there's no longer any need for me to have more than one Linux distro. I only keep XP there for my mobile phone, which doesn't like talking to my Slack installation, even when running XP in VirtualBox.

Good luck anyway!