CrossOver Support - Community Forums

CrossOver for Linux is installed on a Ubuntu VM. I'm trying to install Office 2010 with CrossOver; installing from my Office DVD. Setup asks for a product key and will not continue without one. This is the same copy of Office that I have installed on my Windows PC. Advice?

CrossOver allows you to install Windows software on non-Windows OS's, but you will still need any credentials or license keys which you would normally.

I cannot speak to whether the MS Office license you have would permit you to install a copy on both your Windows machine and a second (e.g., Ubuntu) machine. In any case, you will need to enter registration for Office running under CrossOver just as you wold for Office running on MS Windows.

So in the CrossOver introductory video, when the narrator says: "...you're running the Windows applications you want on your PC without a Windows license..." he means that you can run a Windows application without installing Windows, but you still need a product key for the application (if one is required). Makes sense.

Steven Lesser wrote:

So in the CrossOver introductory video, when the narrator says:
"...you're running the Windows applications you want on your PC
without a Windows license..." he means that you can run a Windows
application without installing Windows, but you still need a product
key for the application (if one is required). Makes sense.

Just so, yes. It is a replacement for Windows itself, but not for all the various applications which you might want to run on Windows.

Do you need Microsoft Office 2010 specifically (say for a program that integrates with it, to learn things specific to Microsoft Office or a template file that you know will not load on other platforms), or just a program that opens Microsoft Office files?

There are a handful of Open Source alternatives for Microsoft Office available for Linux.

They all handle importing and exporting Microsoft Office documents very well. Exporting is nearly perfect on almost all of them, but importing can run onto issues with files that use the undocumented features of Microsoft Office, however I have never run into these issues myself.