MS Office arrives on the Linux desktop

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by Rick Lehrbaum (March 27, 2002)

CodeWeavers' new CrossOver Office product delivers on the long-standing goal of the Wine project: making it easy for anyone to successfully install and run Windows software on Linux systems, using a simple point-and-click process. It works so well, and the Windows programs that it currently supports run so smoothly, that it makes me feel slightly guilty -- as though I'm somehow cheating.

When I first defenestrated my desktop computer last May, I fully expected to face some level of hardship on an ongoing basis. And after nearly a year of using Linux exclusively as my desktop OS, I have become quite accustomed to a variety of application compromises on a daily basis. A sort of grin-and-bear-it situation.

Even my extremely rare use of one or another of Microsoft's Office programs under Wine has been hampered by the far-from-optimal Wine installation on my machine. I couldn't print, for example, from any Wined Office programs. PowerPoint had illegible fonts and often crashed. Word also suffered from font problems and misbehaved in various and sundry ways. Also, although I had at least some success running Windows programs that were lying around on my no-longer-booted Windows partition, I hadn't a clue how to install any new Windows software packages on my system from a CDROM, or from a downloaded installation script.

But through CrossOver Office's installation of MS Office on my system, it's now so easy (and reliable) to use Word, PowerPoint, and Excel for reading doc, ppt, and xls files, that I'm beginning to fear that those programs -- which I was getting so good at doing without -- might no longer be relegated to the status of "options of last resort". Now, they run just like Linux apps on my system -- and their icons appear just like Linux application icons on my KDE desktop. In fact, it's getting harder and harder to remember which of the programs I've gathered onto my desktop are Linux programs, and which are Windows programs . . .

The lower lefthand corner of my desktop: Peaceful coexistence?

Be warned: this new-found "compatibility" can really insinuate itself into your daily computer use if you're not diligent. My KDE taskbar, for example, already has a Word launcher icon docked on it, right next to the ones for GIMP, OpenOffice, AbiWord, and Bluefish. See it?

Of course I put it there as a "just in case" convenience -- for those times when AbiWord won't display a doc file properly and I'm too impatient to wait the half minute while OpenOffice loads. But how long will I continue trying not to use Word first, when I know AbiWord won't render the doc files accurately 25% of the time (or more)? Unfortunately, we do live in an MS Office world.

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