WINE and MS Office
Before you do anything, make sure you have the latest WINE from WineHQ. You can use the Synaptic Package Manager to do this if you’re running Ubuntu/Debian (which is what I did). The main advantage of this is that it will do a “smart upgrade” if you already have a WINE installation on your system.
» http://www.winehq.com/site/download-deb
There’s a useful list of what applications are reported to run under WINE, alone with some installation instructions at Franks Corner. This is a great place to start if you’re one of those people like me who can’t RTFM in the first place:
» http://www.frankscorner.org/
I managed to get MS Office 2000 installed and running thanks to the tips at Franks Corner. The installation process was a little painful but it helped a lot to upgrade to the latest version of WINE.
When I installed the installer crashed out the first time and so I ran it a second time and selected “Reinstall MS Office”. There seems to be something dodgy with the interface in the setup where you can see the things that it’s going to install but can’t select or deselect them.
Steps:
1. wine setup.exe (to run the installer)
2. Ran it a second time, asked it to reinstall again.
3. Complete! I think I might have had to do a “wine wineboot” at this point.
4. Running “wine WINWORD.EXE” or “wine EXCEL.EXE” in the c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office directory started the applications.
MSACCESS.EXE won’t start because it requires IE3.0 or greater. “Clippy” should be turned off (he causes problems) by clicking Show/Hide/Show/Hide/Show/Hide in the Help Menu. He then asks if you want to turn him off and you can answer yes. There’s a tick box somewhere for this as well.
