How to Install MS Office 2007 on Linux using Wine

As a Linux user, I must keep a copy of Windows. One reason is that I should edit MS Office files, such as .doc, .ppt, .xls and .xml (office 2003 xml format) required by, created by or for other using Windows. Wine worked for me with Office 2003 ever but has this or that problem. I tried the new version of Wine (1.5.11) on Fedora 17 recently with Office 2007 and it turned out that Office 2007 Enterprise on Wine works great on Linux. I searched the Web and found some tutorials, but it turns out that things are not that complex now. Hence, I note it down in this post.

Install wine.i686

This is the most tricky part: installing wine.i686 instead of wine.x86_64 which will fails to work even with WINEARCH=win32 set.

# yum install wine.i686

If there are conflicts, you should remove the old wine installations first.

Prepare wine prefix

Run

$ WINEARCH=win32 winecfg

and wine will create a prefix in ~/.wine.

My version of wine is set to “Windows XP”.

Install Office 2007

Just as run normal Windows applications:

$ wine setup.exe

Run Office 2007

We can run Office 2007 on Linux with wine now.

Run Word and Excel

To run Word and Excel, no special changes are needed.

$ wine WINWORD.EXE

or

$ wine EXCEL.EXE

in Office 2007’s installation path which is “.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office12/” by default.

Run Powerpoint

It need a little trick to run powerpoint by overwriting the riched20 DLL libraries.

Run winecfg, in tab “Libraries”, select “riched20” in “New override for library” and click “Add”. The edit the “riched20” overrides to be “native”.

Then you can run powerpoint:

$ wine POWERPNT.EXE

Make things easier

By scripts ;)

word2k7.sh:

#!/bin/bash
wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office12/WINWORD.EXE" -n $*

excel2k7.sh:

#!/bin/bash
wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office12/EXCEL.EXE" -n $*

powerpoint2k7.sh:

#!/bin/bash
wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office12/POWERPNT.EXE" -n $*

You can directly open a file (e.g. Word file, ./my-work.doc) by:

$ word2k7.sh ./my-work.doc

Eric Ma

Eric is a systems guy. Eric is interested in building high-performance and scalable distributed systems and related technologies. The views or opinions expressed here are solely Eric's own and do not necessarily represent those of any third parties.

16 comments:

  1. 在RHEL 6.3中安装成功并运行流畅,PowerPoint仍需要添加riched20(native)后才可运行。

  2. How could I launch a doc document (MSWord) directly (click on it). I have installed office 2007 enterprise under wine (PUPPY LINUX), and it’s very tedious to find it with the open file dialog on word.

    1. The command to open an word file, say file.doc by Word under wine is:

      $ wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Microsoft Office/Office12/WINWORD.EXE" -n /path/to/file.doc

      From this, I believe you can configure the file manager to open a document by double/single clicking it.

  3. I have problems in entering Chinese in POWERPOINT using ibus or scim under Fedora 17 (32bits and 64bits) and Ubuntu 12.10.

    Using latest wine 15.x to run Office 2007 would have problems in crashing when closing the office applications.

  4. For reference, the solution described here (Wine + Office 2007) works fine for me on Fedora 19 with wine 1.7.8:

    $ wine –version
    wine-1.7.8

    $ uname -r
    3.12.9-201.fc19.x86_64

  5. I don’t want to run PwrPnt- I just want to remove Office 2007 from my Ubuntu 14.04; I’m also using Wine (1.6.2) to run my Roots Magic, and my PAF5 programs.

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