Update

There is a brief update to this topic which is located at Install Microsoft Office 2007 in Ubuntu 8.10.

I have to admit that I absolutely love Office 12, OpenOffice just doesn’t compare! So, I needed to install Office 2007 into Ubuntu. If you do too, follow along with my handy guide!

Install Wine

First off, you need to install Wine. I won’t get into what it is, but you can get more information on the Official Wine site.

  1. Add the Wine repository’s key to your system’s list of trusted APT keys by entering the following into the Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal):
    sudo wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
  2. Add the repository to your system’s list of APT sources, again in the Terminal:
    sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list
  3. Update APT’s package information by running the following command (once again, in the Terminal):
    sudo apt-get update
  4. If you’re on your Ubuntu machine now, you can install Wine by clicking this link. If not, you can install by going to Applications->Add/Remove and searching for Wine.

Configure Wine

Now for the fun stuff!

  1. Open Wine. You can do so by clicking Applications->Wine->Configure Wine or by hitting ALT+F2 and entering:
    winecfg
  2. Under the Applications tab, set the Windows Version to Windows Vista.
  3. Under the Drivers tab, click Autodetect to assign a driver letter (D:\) to your CDROM drive (/media/cdrom0)
  4. Install winetricks by entering the following into the Terminal:
    sh winetricks msxml3 dotnet20 gdiplus riched20 riched30 vcrun2005sp1

    5. This will automatically install the following components:

    Microsoft XML Parser

    Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

    Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2003

    Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1

    When wintricks is finished, it will let you know:

  5. Navigate to following folder: ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/
    You can do this via your Home folder (once at your Home folder, hit CTRL+H to display hidden files).
  6. We need to make a backup of a .dll file; rename rpcrt4.dll to rpcrt4.bak
  7. Download a new version of rpcrt4.dll and place it in the Wine system32 folder (from step 5)
  8. Open up the Wine Configuration tool again (ALT+F2, winecfg) and click the Libraries tab. In the New override for library field, enter in rpcrt4.dll and hit the Add button.

Install Microsoft Office 2007

Now that Wine is all set up, you can install Office 2007!

  1. Navigate to your CD-ROM drive and click setup.exe.
  2. Enter your product key
  3. Click the giant Install Now button (I noticed that the installation progress stays at 0% for a while, but your mileage may vary)!

    4. If you click the Customize button, you can chose which components that you want to install. You can also enter your name, initials and company name. This information will be embedded into every document that you create, just like in the PC version.

Clean Up Wine Installation Settings

There are a couple of crucial cleanup and configuration steps remaining - hang in there, we’re all most done!

  1. Navigate back to Wine’s system32 folder (~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/)
  2. Delete the downloaded rpcrt4.dll.
  3. Rename rpcrt4.bak back to rpcrt4.dll.
  4. Open winecfg (ALT+F2, winecfg) and remove the rpct4 override we placed in the Libraries tab.
  5. Click the Applications tab and set the Windows Version to Windows XP.

You’re all done! :D

All of the Microsoft Office applications should now have appeared in your application menu: Applications->Wine->Programs->Microsoft Office

Source

Some of the information used on this how-to was gathered from the WineHQ page for Office 2007.