Microsoft Office

General Help
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How can I install Microsoft Office like word, excel, database, etc,?

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Generally, you can install MS Office products in Wine and run it using the Wine Compatibility layer. You can install WINE with:

sudo apt install zorin-windows-app-support

I would argue against doing so. While it may allow you to use the familiar Office environment you have already learned, you may benefit from learning other office suites.
There are Open Source projects like Libreoffice (sudo apt install libreoffice) and Open Office that can install and run on Linux without the need of a compatibility layer and any troubleshooting that accompanies using a layer.

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-sigh-
I tried to get it to work (with wine). It is not an easy task. The only version of MS office that I could get to work was MS office 2007 but even that did not work as smoothly as it was supposed to. Many people say that CrossOver works better than wine but unfortunately, that is a paid software. As an alternative, I found Softmaker free office and WPS Office (the snap version by some independent developer who has removed the bloat) that work best.

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I recently switched from Libre Office to WPS Office .....

Biggest reason was that WPS will recognize PDF files as a lot of downloads from websites are PDF .... and the fact that WPS is a bit lighter (size wise) than Libre ...

Anyway do a search for Office Suites for Linux as you will find quite a few that will also recognize Win formats ....

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Changed from Tutorial to General.

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Unfortunately it is not really feasible to get Microsoft Office working in Zorin right now, in fact I'd say this is one of the bigger pain points for people transitioning from Windows. I've tried almost every solution proposed out there and they either just don't work or come with massive trade-offs that make it not worth trying.

There are alternatives though that you can use, that will generally accomplish the same things:

  • For an alternative to Outlook, I recommend Evolution, which more-or-less aims to be a drop-in replacement for it. Very similar feature set. Otherwise, there is Thunderbird - there are also lots of other clients that are more focused on just being a good email client like Geary or Mailspring.
  • For a OneNote replacement, check out Joplin. If you have a OneDrive account, you can sync your notes up with it, and there is a mobile version of it too.

For word processing, spreadsheets and slide presentations, my picks are, in order of preference:

  • WPS Office is, by far, the best solution out there at the moment if you want an office suite that matches Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, feature-for-feature. It works very similarly (practically copying MS Office word-for-word in places) and document compatibility is near-perfect. I live in spreadsheets for my day job and WPS Spreadsheets is the best replacement I have found for Excel, bar none. Be mindful that it is closed source, Chinese-made software, and the Linux version doesn't appear to be very well maintained. At some point I'd like to do research into whether it is phoning home as some people have speculated.
  • OnlyOffice Desktop Editors is a close second that is being developed rapidly and has excellent compatibility with MS Office formats, though not as good as WPS in my experience. It's quickly improving, though, and it's open source.
  • SoftMaker Office and FreeOffice seem to work pretty well and have decent compatibility.
  • LibreOffice is a mature and well-rounded office suite, and it is the only one of this list that has its own answer to Microsoft Access. It's not cross-compatible with Access though, so keep that in mind.

I can probably give better recommendations if you'd like to tell us about what kind of work you do the most often with Office?

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That's odd. I have tried using Office 2007 and 2010 on Wine+PlayonLinux (not CrossOver)(tested distros are Zorin OS 16, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Linux Mint 20.2) and both have worked near perfectly.

Word, Excel, Access and Onenote 2007 work as desired right out of the box, and while PowerPoint does not work OOB, two minutes' worth of easy tweaking makes it launch and work as desired.
Source: How to Install MS Office 2007 on Linux using Wine - SysTutorials

As for Office 2010 apps, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Onenote work perfectly, with no errors being detected by me so far. Access works fine, but it is impossible to create very advanced forms and reports.

I don't use Publisher, Outlook and other applications, so I don't know whether they work on Linux as they would on Windows.

NOTE: DO NOT launch the installer from the Nautilus file manager! Use the PlayonLinux script to install.

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The thing is, I could install and use it but I found two things very annoying.
First, I could not open documents inside Microsoft Office by double clicking on the document (even when I made it the default application. I could only open the documents while inside Microsoft Office using Files-> Open Document->selecting document->open
The second thing is that the interface font was very jagged.
I found wine very interesting, yet very disappointing. I could only install small applications but programs that are very big in size or need Microsoft .NET Framework to run are very difficult to install. I also tried AutoCAD, Microsoft Office 2016 and Microsoft indic input tool but they did not work either.

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Also see this from another thread, @Mr.Praneeth2008 seems to have got most of Office 2010 working using PoL:

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I feel for the CodeWeavers guys trying to get it working properly in Wine. They are so close but Office under the hood is a messy, capricious suite of programs that puts its tendrils deep into the OS. They'd run into the same problems with it as something like an antivirus or anti-cheat program.

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The same people are working on wine and on steam proton :sweat_smile:

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An update: Office 365 seems to install and run with the most recent version of Crossover. Latest versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint all launch and seem to work okay after installing. I'll evaluate Access, Publisher, OneNote and Outlook further and report my findings.

Edit: Some cursory observations. Generally on the surface level they seem to work well and things get more and more dicey the more advanced you get.

  • Excel: Generally works quite well with some caveats.
    • PowerQuery (Get & Transform) doesn't work.
    • Macros don't work.
  • Word: Works great for just plain old word processing. Mail Merge with a spreadsheet works at first, but breaks when you try to reopen the doc.
  • PowerPoint: Works, but crash-happy.
  • OneNote: doesn't really work for a typical use modern-day use case - only supports local notebooks. Notebooks in the cloud fail to open.
  • Outlook: Works, but it's very hit-or-miss. If I can get an account to work at all, it works great - otherwise it doesn't work at all, throwing errors accessing .pst files (though there's no reason I can think of it would not be able to get to those files).
  • Access: Falls over when editing forms, code or reports. Not really usable.
  • Editing files stored on OneDrive doesn't work natively. However, you can work around this by mounting your OneDrive to your Zorin PC with a tool like OneDriver (recommended) or Rclone and then opening the files from there. Your mount would handle the uploads then and Office will just think it's working on files locally. You will lose collaborative editing and autosave this way, though.
  • There are weird artefacts on the screen caused by the rendering of the drop shadows under windows, most noticeable when switching back and forth between workspaces, and changing focus between applications is a bit glitchy. Focusing and unfocusing the window works around this until you switch workspaces again.

All in all, for the core programs of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, it's quite usable, good enough for day-to-day, basic use. Not anywhere near as reliable as running them in a full-fledged VM, but I'm very surprised this solution doesn't get more coverage in Linux blogs.

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Forgot to mention this earlier.

Prior to install of MS Office, install WInetricks and use it to install riched20, riched30, dotnetfx20, dotnetfx40, msxml6 and corefonts, otherwise, Powerpoint and Onenote will not run.

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Marked solution. 218

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Hi. I run a church AV setup, we have visiting speakers, who bring Powerpoint slides to illustrate their talks.
I need guidance on how to ensure that their Powerpoint slides (Powerpoint is called into action via OpenLP, a dedicated church display program - which runs well under Zorin ) will work. I have tried with Open Office and another program, but the slide content, particularly colour seems to get scrambled along with some transitions, this is obviously not helpful to either the person giving the talk or the audience (congregation). Thanks in advance for all advice.

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You can try only office or softmaker free office or wps office. All three of them provide better ms office compatibility than most other office suites.

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