Written by Tom Wickline

Tuesday, 20 May 2008 03:31

Zachary Stewart posted his Office 2007 Install Guide on Sunday May 18th, 2008 to the Wine Application Database and after reading it I thought I would post it here as well. We here at Wine-Review suggested using a rpcrt4.dll from CrossOver Games 7.0 and not CrossOver Office 6.2 because if you install the rpcrt4.dll from CrossOver Office 6.2 it wont work. The rpcrt4.dll in CrossOver Office 6.2 is ancient in terms of how much Wine has progressed since it's release back on October 2, 2007.

We suggest that people support Wine, by purchasing a copy of CrossOver Games and using the rpcrt4.dll from it instead, building the dll from source or holding off a couple more weeks and purchasing a copy of CrossOver Office 7.0 that comes with professional support and many stability and performance fixes that Wine wont have no matter how much tweaking you do. If you purchase CrossOver Office now, you will receive a free copy of CrossOver Games! And your entitled to one year of upgrades and technical support.

Here's a copy of Zak's New Microsoft Office 2007 Install Guide on his Ubuntu system.

This is how I managed to install Microsoft Office 2007 under Ubuntu 8.04 with wine 1 rc.

1. Use a native rpcrt4.dll from your copy of Windows. Copy it to your sytem32 folder and add its override via the winecfg. Do not use the CrossOver Office rpcrt4.dll. I was terribly mistaken when I suggested that. I apologize for the confusion I caused.

2. Now, we need to install all of the dependencies that Office has. Download winetricks, a handy script that allows you to easily install commonly used components, with the following command:

$ wget www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

Now let's install what we need:

$ sh winetricks msxml3 dotnet20 gdiplus riched20 riched30 vcrun2005sp1

Let this commands complete before doing anything else. You will likely have to click through several installers to finish it. Not all of them are titled things like "GDI+." Some of them are simply applications that contain the DLLs needed, such as the PowerPoint viewer.

3. With all the necessary components installed, run winecfg and change your Windows version to Vista.

4. Navigate to your Office CD and execute setup.exe. Some people report the installer being "stuck" on 75%, but still actually installing. Take care that the application is truly frozen before killing it.

5. Once Office is done installing, open winecfg and change your Windows version to XP. I (and others) have had issues running it with Vista.

6. To fix issues with fonts, bullets, and numbering, click the office button, go into Word options, then into language settings. Here, delete all languages except for your own. This has been tested with US English, which works. It is possible that other language packs, even with all the others uninstalled, may cause the issue. If so, I would suggest you post which packs do not work to help the developers.

7. When you insert a picture from file, click on the "Recent" button to stop the rapid switching.

The following applications (as of Wine rc 1) do NOT work:

Equation Editor
Access
Outlook

The following ones mostly work:

Word
Publisher (most color schemes do not work, only those named after a basic color, such as blue or red. Fancier names do not work)
Excel (There are issues with charts, however)
PowerPoint

Note:
Their is a install order of the third party packages that needs to be taken into account here. You will need to install vcrun2005sp1 first then core fonts then msxml then riched updates.