I installed Office 2003 using Wine. Word and PowerPoint seem to work alright (lots of fixmes do appear, though), but Excel won't even fully load. I do have the MS fonts installed and also built WINE with fontforge. I have tried some of the hacks in this Wine Review Article, but I don't know if any of them made a difference (certainly did not with Excel). I'll have to try this again with a clean Wine directory.

One annoyance is that I always have to kill the language bar(?) or else it covers up things.

You don't need excel dammit, use gnumeric, it's got the same interface, it's now stable, it's more accurate, and it's got the same or in some cases more features.

I mean, I would not argue if someone was using M$ powerpoint or even word, mostly because the poor support quality of openoffice. I don't really like openoffice, it's bloated (less so recently), buggy (still buggy), and the export/import system is not very good. But, it's acceptable for any work I'll ever have to do, especially since I export to pdf and give people that instead of the evil '.doc'. Oh, and to put things in context, I'm not saying word/powerpoint are better than openoffice, no, but they're at about the same level, and the inter-compatibility is still not good.

But for excel, you have no excuse not to be using gnumeric, IMO.

Just installed wine-1.0-i486-1alien.tgz ( thanks very much AlienBob! ) to replace wine-0.9.47, the last of many versions I have used. It is a HUGE improvement. My congratulations to the WINE developers.
My specialist apps ( Varian MS WorkStation 5.52, AMDIS32 and MSSEARCH.v.2.0 ) are working very well with just some minor issues. Elements that did not work are now working and stability is much better. I had given up on trying to get these to work in WINE, but they are now very usable.
My next big test will be to try for Varian MS WorkStation 6.6 which requires a MS Access 2000 runtime to be installed. I have never been able to complete this before.

For most documents I use OOo, and I encourage others to use ODF by sending them those formats instead of proprietary formats. However, none of OOo's components are completely compatible with MS office, which like it or not is the standard in most places. In particular, Gnumeric and Calc are not compatible with Excel Macros, and I don't think they work with Crystal Ball yet. While Gnumeric can be manually scripted and Calc can make its own Macros, there is much work to be done before users of this free software can correctly import advanced Excel documents.

That being said, for simple spreadsheets Calc works just fine for me. Gnumeric does sound like it is more compatible with Excel than Calc (the extra accuracy is a plus as well), so I'll definitely have to give it a try (Gnumeric SlackBuild). It seems to be missing pivot tables, unfortunately (I don't use them all too often anyways).

So, for personal documents, and those I share with people using free Office software, I don't need MS Office. For the times that I have to use MS documents I may not have a choice otherwise depending on the features they have in them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: MS Office is currently the best Office program out there (unfortunately). If I had to use OpenOffice every day I think I would want to defenestrate my computer. AbiWord isn't nearly as good as OOo, and OOo isn't as good as MS Office. Word can be an excruciatingly painful experience. However, it's still better, IMO, than Writer. I prefer the numbering and such in Writer (in Word sometimes you have to insert a page break, followed by backspacing, just to get complex numbering to work -- it's a nightmare), but writing papers with graphs, tables, results, etc. is just easier in Word than in Writer. And it looks better too.

I haven't used Gnumeric in a while, so I don't know how much it has improved. Statistical capabilities are one of the main features of Excel (though there are other spreadsheet programs that do a better job if you're doing pure stats), and importing an Excel graph/table/etc. into Word is dead easy. I hate MS oh so very much, and I'm not a fan of proprietary software, but I just can't be stuck with some of the (IMO) inferior office applications just because they're open source. In addition, if you send a spreadsheet to someone in the real world, if it's not Excel-formatted it's useless. You can export to Excel format, but you'd have to check it anyway -- and if you have to do that anyway, why not just use Excel in the first place and cut the middle-man out?

All of the presentation software on Linux, at least that I have come across, is absolutely terrible. Impress is one of the worst pieces of software I have seen. It's unintuitive and feature-incomplete. PowerPoint is WAY better. I don't make presentations very frequently, but when I do, I use PowerPoint.

>MS Office is currently the best Office program out there (unfortunately).

It depends on your working environment. I'm working with huge texts and lot of data, so in the end LaTeX, Vim, OpenOffice or even Abiword is more than enough.

>Statistical capabilities are one of the main features of Excel

I'm using Statistica, Excel is something for the office. That said, I don't have any problems to use Gnumeric.

>All of the presentation software on Linux, at least that I have come across, is absolutely terrible.

It depends. Do you want to entertain your audience or do you want to inform your audience? I'm a scientist not some financial guy presenting some graphs with nice animations to impress the money department of the company.

>if you send a spreadsheet to someone in the real world

What is your 'real world'? Microsoft campus in Redmond? I'm working in the so-called real world, maybe it's just a different corner, but the world is huge enough, sometimes we have just some narrowed point of view.

By the way most of the time we are using CSV in the 'scientifical world' :-)

As you can see, it depends on _your_ context.

Hi,

I'm currently a grad student and wrote all of my papers this semester using OpenOffice in Slackware... complete with tables, graphics, and importing word documents that were written in MS Office 2007. I just used the command-line odfconverter to import them and everything worked great.

I will also add that I've been testing OpenOffice 3.0 beta recently and it is much better at handling MS Office 2007 documents than previous versions of OpenOffice.

As for WINE, it has worked very well for me under Slackware 12.1. I convert a lot of divx/xvid videos to DVD and I use ConvertXtoDVD under WINE to do it. DeVeDe for Linux works okay but just isn't as good. Using ConvertXtoDVD under WINE you do lose the preview screen but the conversion itself works flawlessly.

Dig

My kids use OOo for school without any problems.
And BTW, the html that Word produces is complete and utter crap.

To get back on topic: I've used (several versions of) Wine for a couple of programs and never had any luck with it. Not installable in the worst case, slow and buggy in the best case.
But it depends on the apps you use, I guess...

Ok, well I guess I haven't gotten any 'advanced' Excel documents, that's my bias.

The reason you have problems with this in Word, or OOo, is because these are functions
of desktop publishing software. And no, Mickey$oft Publisher is not.

You would find yourself able to do that job well if you use true desktop publishing software
such as Adobe InDesign, or even it's predecessor, PageMaker; rather than such a poorly
coded word processor in the first place.

As the little boy learned from his father when asking about M$ Word:

Son: "Daddy, why do they call Word a word processor?"

Father: "Well, son, you know what a food processor is..."

M$ Word was a POS word processor, which Mickey$oft tried to turn into publishing software.
They failed, as usual.

I would *LOVE* to use LaTeX to create my documents, but many profs will ONLY accept MS Word .doc files. Maybe it's just my university that's behind the times, but so be it -- everything needs to be in .doc format.
I fully agree -- however, if I have to present something on someone else's computer (and as a science student and not a professor that happens...), PowerPoint is basically the only thing I can use (or something that can convert to PowerPoint). After searching for some presentation software a while back, most of it was either too simplistic (using HTML stuff, for example) or not good enough (Impress). I never use animations in my presentations, but I do use Autoshapes (or their equivalent) to try and explain myself better through images. Impress doesn't do a good job here, IMO. Of course, I could create images in the GIMP or another program, but that's raising the level of complexity (and wasted time) beyond what I need.
Again, my "real world" involves people who have no idea what Linux, open-source, and OOo are. The fact that these people happen to be graduates, professors, or other students is kind of saddening, but true nonetheless. They all have their fancy Macs with Office on them -- and since installing OOo just to read a students' paper is out of the question, I have to provide everything in MS Office format. I suspect the same is true with a lot of people. There are some nice people that accept PDFs, but most don't.
True, most of the time. It's more Word than Excel that seems to be locked into place, and since I need to be sure that the document will be readable, I need to either use Word or export to .doc and check in Word -- but Word is better than most of the alternatives out there (or at least the ones that can be easily exported to .doc format).
I 100% agree with you. Given the choice, I would use a LaTeX kind of solution (still not the best, but cheaper than Adobe. ). However, I'm still locked into the format with my peers, and so there aren't many options.

Macros, macros, macros. Does gnumeric support an equivalent macro language? (I'm not arguing, just asking.) Recently I tested gnumeric, calc, and kspread with several of my Excel 97 spreadsheets. Most are basic lists with various simple calculations. None of my personal spreadsheets are complicated. KSpread could not import the simplest of spreadsheets --- cell formulae were converted to values. Perhaps there is a configuration option incorrectly set but as that old adage about first impressions goes ---.

Macros. Which leads me into my post for this thread. I have used past WINE versions with mixed success. I was able to configure Word 97 (Office 97) to run, but not any of my template VBA macros. I could not open the VBA editor. I have several customized Word 97 templates, all built with many macros. Without those macros the templates are impotent. I never could get the VBA environment to function in WINE. Despite all the accolades I read about Office 97 running in WINE, I never read anything about the associated VBA environment. Has anybody successfully ran the Word 97 VBA environment?

The pundits at Microsoft consider Word 97 a dead product, but everything I have customized in that environment through the years continues to work wonderfully for me. Currently I'm using Word 97 in NT4 in VirtualBox, but if I could get VBA to run flawlessly under WINE, I would prefer that route. WINE would require far less overhead than a virtual machine. I enjoy running Slackware and GNU/Linux, but Word 97 is not going away from my computers for a long time.

I have been using Word 97 for 10 years. Throughout that period I seldom experienced crashes or lost documents. I never experienced the trauma of Windows 95 or 98, having gone from WFWG 3.11 straight to NT4. Perhaps that helped me obtain a stable Word 97 environment. Then too, as a long time technical writer, I long ago learned the beauty and power of templates and style tags. I use those tools for all but the simplest of documents. I don't think anybody will accuse me of being a Microsoft shill, but I won't back down from saying that I have been happily productive with Word 97 for many years --- and Word 6 before that. I have written several long documents too. Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones. Or perhaps I grok Word 97 better than most people.

To that comment I agree heartily.

I installed Office 2003 on a clean Wine directory, but the problem with Excel persisted. This time, instead of using riched* from my Windows installation I used the ones from the riched30 update. This seemed to make no difference. I still used the msxml.msi file as described in the Wine Office 2003 install tutorial (see post #16)

The key for me to get Excel to work was to change some of the Graphics options in winecfg. You either have to turn off desktop control or put Excel in a virtual desktop. After that it loads up fine.

However, there are still problems with Excel.

* Bold - does not show up
* Drop down selections (font, font size) broken - can type in what you want
* Have to close Excel by clicking X or using ALT+f-x then close virtual desktop

Also, supposedly VB (for macros) does not work until dcom98 is installed as well. From what I have read this might mess up other things, so it is a good idea to have office installed in its own Wine directory. The Office uninstall routine seems to fail for me as well, so this is yet another good reason to put it in its own wine prefix directory.

Another interesting bug I noticed is that if I turned off decorations (Graphic option) by Default then turning it on for Excel had no affect.

My Office 2003 wine environment uses Win XP and by default has decorations and desktop control on. The riched* and msxml3 dlls are overridden. The same dlls for Excel are overridden but no decorations or desktop control is used. I have a virtual desktop instead.

I noticed that the fonts in Word don't look quite as good as they should. I'm using the wine and fontforge slackBuilds for my packages, and I also copied my Windows fonts into the Fonts folder under my wine directory. I am assuming that wine is preferring the fonts from the Fonts directory, but I don't know if this is true. I also don't know if there is a noticeable difference between the fonts created with fontforge and my respective native Windows fonts.

Why don't you use the .rtf format?
Any word processor can read that.
Or, if it's read-only, export it as a .pdf file.

heh, grok! One of the first science fiction books I actually finished.