Installing Office 2007 on Ubuntu

This evening I thought I finally give installing Office 2007 another go. Not that I don’t like OpenOffice, but I often deal with files that have more than 65k lines…

I am no fan of Microsoft, but I must admit that the Office suite was always great. Probably that’s why it’s the only non native software that’s made it to the Mac…
I also got quite used to using the ribbon and it’s visually very pretty to work with MS.

So, I read that you should use an older wine version, namely 1.1.14, but I also read on the wine site that everything above 1.1.3 should also be suitable, so I will get the latest wine version Synaptic can find (which is 1.1.38). I will also install wine-gecko and I know we will need cabextract… The package manager thinks it’s wise to install a few other packages to, so here we go!

Good news: so far so good..
it starts the installation and asks for product key…
off to choose the programmes…
and the installation proceeds… (the installation is anything but quick…)

For the next step we need winetricks:
Get it by:

sudo wget www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

So now we should be able to install a few windows repositories:

sh winetricks corefonts tahoma vcrun2005sp1 wsh56js

This will ask you a few time if it’s OK to install certain things and once completed, you need to configure wine:

winecfg

Find the libaries tab and add to new overrides:
riched20 & usp10
both will need the ‘Native (Windows)’ button ticked.

And off we go!
It installed in fine and it runs fine. Here is a screenshot:

Office 2007 Installer – The windows installer service cannot update one or more protected windows files.

FIX: Office 2007 Installer – The windows installer service cannot update one or more protected windows files.

I came across an interesting dilema just now trying to install Office 2007.

Before actually starting to install the product the setup stalled with:

The windows installer service cannot update one or more protected windows files.

I was a little stunned, this is clean installed box. So I checked the Event Viewer:

Product: Microsoft Software Update for Web Folders  (English) 12 -- Error 1933.

The Windows Installer service cannot update one or more protected Windows files. SFP Error: -536870654.

List of protected files:rnc:program filescommon filesmicrosoft sharedweb server extensions40binfp4autl.dll

Ah ok, this is a customised installation of windows (I’ll post how this happend later) and its looking for the frontpage extensions which (in this install) doesnt exist. So how to fix? Simple, download a copy of the missing file from DllDump, place it into the c:program filescommon filesmicrosoft sharedweb server extensions40bin folder and retry installation!