Wine and Microsoft Office 2010 in Ubuntu 11.10

After jumping between a dual boot system (Ubuntu 11.10 and Windows 7) while writing 50+ pages of papers over a few days it was time to install Office on Ubuntu. Here are the steps I took and what I learned.

Installing Wine (and winetricks):


Install wine from the terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa


sudo apt-get update


sudo apt-get install wine1.5

Downloading winetricks:

wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks


chmod a+x winetricks


sudo mv winetricks /usr/local/bin

Note that winetricks is not required for this installation, but useful for other application.

Installing and Running Microsoft Word 2010:

Prepare Installation Environment

sudo mkdir ~/.wine/drive_c/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v2.0.5..../CONFIG


sudo cp /etc/mono/2.0/machine.config ~/.wine/drive_c/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v2.0.5..../CONFIG

Installing Microsoft Office
Download installation file, right-click => "Open With" => "Wine Windows Program Loader". Once you have entered the product key and agreed to terms of use, choose default installation.

(Sorry, but Ubuntu does not allow screen shots while right-click menus are open)

Running Applications

Application can be found through the Unity menu under the application name, e.g. "Microsoft Word 2010" "Microsoft Excel 2010" "Microsoft PowerPoint 2010"

Troubleshooting:
If there are problems see this blog and MS Office install guide from wine.org. Note that some posts state that installation requires that "winbind" be installed in wine and "riched20" be installed through winetricks. My successful installation (5/1/2012) did not require either.

Discussion
I chose port my Microsoft productivity suite to Ubuntu based on time required to switch between operating systems. The fact that windows take forever to load and decides to update every time I shut down also did not help its case.

Open/Libre Office were not a viable solutions since everyone else on my projects runs windows and with native Microsoft Office. Open/Libre Office do not do a good job maintaining formatting between applications. Also, templates and themes provided by Microsoft allow users to make documents look professional quickly and easily.

Why not LaTeX? I prefer LaTeX for research documents/reports or journal submissions but not enough people are comfortable enough to write (and competently layout) a document in LaTeX. If you are writing something that is equation heavy or uses lots of greek letters, LaTeX is the way to go. The Word equation editor is very point-click oriented.