wine on Linux

[K.C. Chan]

Has anyone got wine to work with microsoft office, namely excel and word. If so, what are the steps to getting it to work? Thanks in advance.

[Kelli Ward]

I haven't, but, if you go to the sun.com web-site, you can download Star Office 5.2
It can read MS office files and you can save created documents as MS office files. It's a nice program.
Check it out.
Kel

[Mark Fenton]

Michael,

I suspect that while it might be possible to make wine run MS Office, at least for a while, it probably won't do it well (or reliably) enough to satisfy.

Gotta agree with Kelly, Star Office is a pretty good substitute.

The latest incarnation of KOffice is much better than previous ones -- though it still erroneously complains about file formats when opening other than KOffice files. That and it doesn't handle formulas the same way that Excel does.

If you want to take the MSOffice plunge, start by identifying all the .dlls that it needs and putting them in an appropriate path. That won't be the total answer, but it will give you an idea of how far you have to go....

hth

[Eric Ladner]

By far the easiest way is on a dual boot system.

You boot up win98, install office. Then boot linux, install wine (get the Code Weavers rpm from codeweavers.com). Edit or create the config file (~/.wine/config) to point to where your "C" drive is, etc. and make sure it is mounted.

Then you should be able to do something like:

cd "/mnt/dos/Program Files/Office"
wine winword.exe

I have run MS Office (office 98 if memory serves) this way successfully.

FYI, it requires a lot of memory.

I do agree that StarOffice and OpenOffice work well also. I use OpenOffice mostly now instead of the wine solution. Mainly I use wine for Quicken, which works pretty well under wine.

[Stuart Browne]

Whilst not of much help, I have previously been able to get MS Office to work under wine. Unfortunately that was about 5 years ago!

I can't see any real reason for an Office 2000 not to work under currently versions of Wine, but I could understand Office XP not.

As has been mentioned in this group, it isn't hard to do a multi-boot system.

It is also reasonably easy to use a Virtual machine (or similar) software such as VMWare, or Win4Lin (have used both successfully in the past few weeks).

I hope this gives you an idea of possible directions if you have issues with Wine.

[K.C. Chan]

Stuart, what is VMWare and Win4Lin? Which one is easer to implement and use? If you don't mind, would you share the links to these resources. Thanks.

[Stuart Browne]

VMWare is a Virtual Machine emulator.

http://www.vmware.com/

It allows you to load a completely different OS under your current one (in terms of the 'workstation' products).

Under linux for instance, you can load Windows '9x/ME/2000/NT, or DOS, or BSD etc. etc.

Win4Lin on the otherhand is the development of a replacement of Win32 API library calls to allow you to run Windows applications within Linux it's self (give or take a bit of implementation issues).

http://www.win4lin.org

It will successfully run MS Office (i've personally seen Office 2000 working), but is limited to a kernel of Windows '98.

Hope these help!