Disclaimer: This tutorial is not for the soft-hearted people. It takes patience and multiple retries to accomplish this.
Despite LibreOffice/OpenOffice being awesome, sometimes we get a word document that does not look good on these software packages and would require to open them using Microsoft Word. In this tutorial, I'll show how I managed to install Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Pro x32 on Wine 1:1.6.2-0ubuntu14 and Ubuntu 16.04.
Do you need a fresh wineprefix? NO, you do not need to create a new fresh wine prefix for this to work (at least I did not need it). You just need to have a x32 wine prefix environment set up. If you don't, here is how to create one:
WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/.wine32 winecfg
All of the steps in this tutorial are mandatory. Otherwise the installation will fail. Do not slack.
Throughout this tutorial, this wine prefix will be used. Always be explicit and define the WINEPREFIX before running wine or winetricks.
Install a few system dependencies:
sudo apt-get install wine-mono0.0.8
sudo apt-get install winbind
Install dlls for your wine prefix using winetricks:
WINEPREFIX=/home/$USER/.wine32 winetricks ie6 msxml6 dotnet20 windowscodecs corefonts
Download wic_x86_enu which is Windows Imaging Component from Microsoft's website at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=32.
This provides windowscodecs which we have already installed using winetricks, however we need the dll to be in our system32 folder. So using Ubuntu's file manager, extract the .exe file (yes you can do that), and find windowscodecs dll file. Copy it to system32 in your wineprefix.
cp windowscodecs.dll /home/$USER/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32
Make sure your wineprefix is set to Windows XP. You can make sure by running Configure Wine from your dash.
And that's about it.
Go find that setup.exe file, run it and install it. I was able to install what I needed: Word, Powerpoint and Excel (as well as Equations browser from Shared section).
And here it is running on my Ubuntu Gnome!
(Never mind the badly scaled windows)
One more thing to thank (me) for:
You'll notice on opening files with Microsoft Office, .lnk files are created in each directory. To prevent this, create a folder named Recent in .wine/users/$USER/. Credits go to this person.
If the installation failed and an error occurred, please make sure that you have did all of the steps above. If it still didn't work, run the setup from terminal and comment down here showing the log. Also have a look at WineHQ.
