Office 2007 in Ubuntu 9.10 with Wine 1.1.32

Written by Tom Wickline

Thursday, 12 November 2009 03:01

About Office 2007

Microsoft Office 2007 (officially called 2007 Microsoft Office system) is the most recent version of Microsoft's productivity suite. Formerly known as Office "12" in the initial stages of its beta cycle, it was released to volume license customers on November 30, 2006 and made available to retail customers on January 30, 2007. These are, respectively, the same dates Windows Vista was released to volume licensing and retail customers. Office 2007 contains a number of new features, the most notable of which is the entirely new graphical user interface called the Fluent User Interface (initially referred to as the Ribbon UI), replacing the menus and toolbars that have been the cornerstone of Office since its inception. Office 2007 requires Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1, or Windows Vista.

Office 2007 also includes new applications and server-side tools. Chief among these is Groove, a collaboration and communication suite for smaller businesses, which was originally developed by Groove Networks before being acquired by Microsoft in 2005. Also included is Office SharePoint Server 2007, a major revision to the server platform for Office applications, which supports "Excel Services", a client-server architecture for supporting Excel workbooks that are shared in real time between multiple machines, and are also viewable and editable through a web page.

Microsoft FrontPage has been removed from the Office suite entirely. It has been replaced by Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, which is aimed towards development of SharePoint portals. Its designer-oriented counterpart Microsoft Expression Web is targeted for general web development. However, neither application is included in any of the Office suites. Also, since speech recognition and handwriting recognition are now part of Windows Vista, speech and ink components have been removed from Office 2007. Handwriting and speech recognition work with Office 2007 only on Windows Vista or Windows XP Tablet PC Edition.

Product Information

Microsoft Office 2007 is a complete suite of productivity and database software that includes the 2007 versions of Publisher, Excel, Outlook, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, PowerPoint, Access, and Word. Powerful contact management features help you consolidate all customer and prospect information in one place, while improved menus present the right tools exactly when you need them. Office 2007 also lets you develop professional marketing materials for print, e-mail, and the Web, and produce effective marketing campaigns in-house. In addition, you can create dynamic business documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and build databases with no prior experience or technical staff.

Whether you're working on a financial spreadsheet, creating an important presentation, or building a customer database, Office 2007 helps you find and use the features you need faster and more easily. The intuitive look and feel of this software, including task-based menus and toolbars that are automatically displayed based on the feature you are using, improves your productivity. With Publisher 2007, you can create and publish a wide range of marketing materials for print, e-mail, and the web with your own brand elements including logo, colors, fonts, and business information. Or take advantage of hundreds of professionally designed and customizable templates, and more than 100 blank publication types. This software also lets you reuse text, graphics, and design elements, and convert content from one publication type to another. You can also combine and filter mailing lists and data from multiple sources, including the 2007 versions of Excel, Outlook, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, and Access, to create personalized print and e-mail materials, and build custom collateral such as catalogs and datasheets.

Wine version tested: 1.1.32
Windows version emulated: XP
Office version: Microsoft Office 2007

This is the simplest way to install office 2007 on ubuntu 9.10 this method should also work with ubuntu 8.04,8.10 and 9.04.

If you have an iso image to MS Office 2007 you will need an iso mounter to mount the image, the best one I found was "Furius ISO Mount" you can download it from the programs manager.

You have to install a version of wine after v1.1.10 older Wine releases will not work.

Step 1. Install Wine:

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/...t.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo aptitude install wine

A .deb package can also be downloaded from http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/ please keep in mind that Ubuntu versions older than Hardy are no longer being updated.

Step 2. Download Winetricks

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

Step 3. Install Cabextract to run the Winetricks smoothly

sudo aptitude install cabextract

Step 4. Run Winetricks

sh winetricks

In the Winetricks window, install each of the following *individually*, which means check & install one, then re-run Winetricks and do the next:

* dotnet11
* gdiplus
* vb3run
* vb4run
* vb5run
* vb6run
* msxml3
* msxml4
* msxml6
* riched20
* riched30
* vcrun6

Step 5. Install MS Office 2007.

From your MS Office Installer CD or Directory, run:

wine setup.exe

Step 6. Run Office 2007

Professional support options

If you should run into any problems with the above howto you can always purchase CrossOver Office from the folks at Codeweavers. Crossover Pro runs on practically every Linux distribution as well as Intel Macs.

Updated 11/17/09 :

I removed most of the vcrun section and all of rpcrt4 sections, some people were having problems with C++ errors and Word not working for them after the install.