Microsoft Office 2007 Update

Written by Nick Koch

Wednesday, 09 April 2008 14:37

TWICKLINE asked me to write up a howto on some of the workarounds I sent him after he got Microsoft Office 2007 (Office12) working. So without any further interruptions I return you to your regular scheduled program.

First of all anyone who used TWICKLINE’s method of using CrossOver Games 7 must either

Buy a copy of CrossOver Games 7
Buy a copy of CrossOver Office, which comes with CrossOver Games 7 for free!
Build CrossOver Games from source

The reason behind this is because using the rpcrt4.dll from CX Games for more than 7 days violates the evaluation license with CodeWeavers for a free trial of CX Games not to mention floating their work around is warez and illegal! That being said there are some other methods to accomplish the goal of getting Office12 to work in Wine.

You can either:

Use the rpcrt4.dll and install Microsoft Office 2007 to get it installed and then delete rpcrt4.dll and go back to original builtin (don’t worry Office12 will work just fine with out it) or
Download CX Games Source and compile the builtin rpcrt4.dll.so and not worry about it being illegal since it is opensource

Follow these procedures to use CX Games opensource rpcrt4.dll.so using the terminal:

wget http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/source/crossover-games-wine-src-7.0.0.tar.gz
tar –xvf crossover-games-wine-src-7.0.0.tar.gz
cd crossover-games-wine-src-7.0.0/source/wine
./configure
make depend && make
sudo cp /usr/lib/wine/rpcrt4.dll.so /usr/lib/wine/rpcrt4.dll.so.bak
sudo cp dlls/rpcrt4/rpcrt4.dll.so /usr/lib/wine

Now you don’t even need to specify rpcrt4.dll as native in winecfg since you compiled the builtin rpcrt4.dll.so and a much cleaner winecfg.

Now that we are legal lets talk about what does and doesn’t work right now and some workarounds to get some things working better. Right now the following programs work:

Excel
OneNote
PowerPoint (degraded – can’t use presentation portion)
PowerPoint Viewer
Picture Manager
Publisher
WinWord

Which still leaves the following programs on the broken list:

Access
Groove
InfoPath
Outlook

If you are a user who is unable to use PowerPoint because it crashes after install. Delete your .wine directory > rm –rf ~/.wine and then follow the method above to get the builtin rpcrt4.dll.so and change wincfg to run as Windows Vista and then reinstall Microsoft Office 2007. After installation run winecfg and change back to Windows XP.

The reason you need to be in Windows Vista for install is because I noticed registry values are getting inputed incorrectly during the install under Windows XP.

PowerPoint will now work fine, but it has one really bad flaw in Wine’s current state in that you can edit presentations but you cannot view them full screen as a presentation. You’ll be able to view two slides and then nothing will happen when you advance or reverse. The workaround here is to use the PowerPoint Viewer 2007 which works flawlessly.

I also wanted to give you users who like Microsoft Office 2007 better then OpenOffice some tips on how to integrate it into your system so you can open documents, presentations and spreadsheets from anywhere and have them open correctly.

Open your favorite text editor and make the following 5 scripts:

excel
#!/bin/bash
wine "c:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE12\\EXCEL.EXE" "`winepath -w "$@"`"

onenote
#!/bin/bash
wine "c:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE12\\ONENOTE.EXE" "`winepath -w "$@"`"

powerpoint
#!/bin/bash
wine "c:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE12\\POWERPNT.EXE" "`winepath -w "$@"`"

pptviewer
#!/bin/bash
wine "c:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE12\\PPTVIEW.EXE" "`winepath -w "$@"`"

publisher
#!/bin/bash
wine "c:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE12\\MSPUB.EXE" "`winepath -w "$@"`"

winword
#!/bin/bash
wine "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE" "`winepath -w "$@"`"

sudo chmod a+x word excel onenote powerpoint pptviewer pubisher
sudo cp word excel onenote powerpoint pptviewer pubisher /usr/local/bin/

There are two methods to make associations for the following file types: .doc .docx .xls .xlsx .ppt .pptx .one .onetoc .pub

Use your favorite file browser and right click on document ie: .doc and then click open with and then point to the associated script that you placed in /usr/local/bin/winword and repeat this method for all the other file types.
Follow KDE or GNOME portion for file associations

KDE users follow this portion to integrate the script you just made

Run the Configure Desktop (Personal Settings) > KDE Componentes > File Associations

click in the "Find filename pattern" box and type in the box .doc then click on application. You'll see two items one for .doc and the other is for .docx. Click the Add button on the lower right and point to the scripts we made above /usr/local/bin/winword and then click ok

Repeat this method for .ppt .xls

For .one .onetoc and .pub you'll have to add from scratch click the add on the bottom left and give a name for this profile say for Microsoft OneNote we'll call it msonenote click on application for type. Then at click Add at the top right to specify the file type *.one and then click add again and add *.pub and click ok. Then click the Add button on the bottom right and specify the script /usr/local/bin/onenote

Repeat this method for .pub

GNOME users follow this portion to integrate the script you just made

Use nautilus file browser and right click on a document ie: .doc and then click open with and click on custom application then point to the associated script that you placed in /usr/local/bin/winword and repeat this method for all the other file types.

Summary
All in all you can get some usability from Microsoft Office 2007 from using the rpcrt4.dll.so from CodeWeavers CrossOver suite, but it’s crippled at best. I recommend that you all buy CrossOver Office which comes with a free copy of CrossOver Games which will allow you to use the entire Microsoft Office 7 suite with no hiccups.

Additionally, anyone who uses Wine should buy CrossOver Office because not only do you get a good product but it supports Wine! All the code that CodeWeavers makes minus the hacks make their way back into Wine and it pays for the developers who spend days on end writing code for Wine.