Running Microsoft Office 2007 on your Mac using Wine / Crossover

** UPDATE: ** This ELEVEN-PLUS-YEAR-OLD blogpost continues to be one of the ones that gets the most random referrals on my website. EVERYTHING in this post is obsolete.**

Okay, be prepared for some serious geekiness here.  If you aren’t interested in hacking your computer, compiling from source code, etc., I’m warning you away.

Anyway, here’s the thing.  I have a macbook pro which I absolutely love. The only pain is that at the office we use Outlook 2007 to connect to our exchange server, and while Apple Mail and entourage are fine for my personal mail, it doesn’t really cut it for work.  Consequently, when I connect to work for email, I have to fire up a full install of windows running under Parallels desktop in order to run my work stuff. That’s no fun.

So, I spent some time in the trying to get Office 2007 to run under Wine and/or Crossover Office.  It’s not all working yet, but most of it is.

First, the video, to show the end result.  All of the apps are running normally (and in fact, pretty fast) under the Crossover 7 installation.

The one thing I haven’t worked out yet is what I started trying to get in the first place — I can’t get Outlook to connect to my exchange server. Maybe another day.

Here’s the How-To

What you need:

1) Crossover Games 7 (next month they are coming out with Crossover Mac/Linux 7, and I’m sure it will work better under that)

2) I needed a Darwine installation for part of this.  I used the pre-built Darwine binaries from http://thisismyinter.net/?cat=7

3) A host of redistributable Microsoft installs.  Will detail as I go through them

Steps

1. If you haven’t already, install Crossover 7.  You can get a trial version from www.codeweavers.com.  Download the “Crossover Games” version, not Crossover Mac. This won’t work under 6.2.1, the latest regular version

2. Once it’s installed, create a new, clean bottle in Crossover.  I called mine, appropriately enough, Office2007

3. Download and install the MS XML Parser 3 into your new bottle.

4. Download and install the MS XML Parser 6 into your new bottle (It may be you don’t need both.  I installed them both, but YMMV)

5. Here’s the tricky part. I couldn’t get .NET Framework 1.1 to install in my crossover bottle, and MS Office won’t load without it.  So, first I deleted anything I had in my wine configuration by doing this at the terminal:

cd ~

sudo rm -rf .wine

That cleared any previous Wine configuration. I didn’t have anything import in there. If you do, you’ll want to find some other option, because this will delete everything in your wine installation.

Now, with my wine directory cleared, I installed Darwine (see above for link).  Get the latest build (as of now, 0.9.58)

Then, at the terminal, type “winecfg” to create your new wine directory.

6. Install .NET Framework 1.1 in your new .wine home.  The easiest way to do it is to get the “Winetricks.sh” script from here:

http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

I saved the script in my downloads directory, then:

sh ~/Downloads/winetricks.sh

Then click on dotnet11 and it will install.

7. From your ~/.wine/drive_c/windows directory, grab the NET Framework directory and manually copy it to your Crossover bottle

8. At the terminal, type wine regedit.  Once in regedit, find the NET framework registry keys and export them. Then, in Crossover, run regedit again and import those keys. You are welcome to try mine, but no guarantees they’ll work. Either way, you still have to copy the files over.

9. Get GDIPlus.dll — you have to have this to run the Office installer.  Drop it in your crossover bottle in /drive_c/windows/system32

10. In Crossover, run Winecfg. Select the Libraries tab, add gdiplus as native.

Now starts the fun.  I had to copy my entire Office 2007 cd to the crossover bottle … /drive_c/Office2007

11. Run /drive_c/Office2007/setup.exe in Crossover.  If you’ve done ALL of the above steps correctly, your installation should start.  Put in your cd key, hit install, and off it goes!

I had about ten failures before I got all these steps right and working. But finally, I saw this:

Then, oh no. I couldn’t get ANYTHING to load except Publisher 2007.  Turns out, if you run winecfg again, you’ll see that these applications are set to “built-in” in Crossover 7:

outlook.exe
access.exe
excel.exe
winword.exe

Ok.  I set all of them to “native, then builtin”.  Try again and:

So now, they’re all running properly, with the one maddening exception: outlook won’t connect to my exchange server.  If you can get this far, let me know if you have any ideas about that!