CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Well,

I guess it's time to give up my hope of moving away from Windows XP. I had high hopes, with the release of Ubuntu 8.10 and the latest Crossover/Wine releases of actually being able to use Office in a work setting, but that is sadly not the case.

Being a scientist, I rely heavily on Excel and Powerpoint for data preparation/analysis and presentation. I thought I may actually be able to run Office on these Linux products under Ubuntu - but was wrong.

I can certainly install Office 2003 or 2007 and yes, they do, "run" in terms of opening a window and maybe drawing a box or two or entering some data. However, whenever I try to actually access any of my actual data files (.xls, .ppt, .xlsx, .pptx), all Office does is crash, crash, crash. Sometimes, I can open some of my smaller/simpler data files, but that seems rare and not very robust in terms of using the full Office feature set once they're open.

Furthermore, Outlook support is sketchy and very limited - there seems to be a push to support Exchange servers, but that's about it (no IMAP for non-private servers (e.g. school servers, Gmail, Yahoo), or http mail with Hotmail).

I appreciate the intent of Codeweavers, and I applaud their efforts. If this "LameDuck" version had worked well, I was planning to purchase more copies for my other systems. But, the reality in my case, is that these products are simply not ready for primetime, mission critical objectives. So, a word of advice to others wanting to try these products - stick with XP, or even Vista(/me shudders) if you're relying on these products in a work-related setting. You may not like the OS, but that is secondary to ensuring your product is completed ontime and correctly...

As a qualifier, I fully admit my testing has been done on only one version of Linux - Ubuntu 8.10. If these issues I've been having are for some reason specific to that version of Linux, then by all means let me know and I'll look into other versions. I chose Ubuntu 8.10 because its feature set pretty much fully supports my Inspiron 8600 and has decent online support.

Our sincerest apologies. At this time, CrossOver may not be sophisticated enough to run some of the more advanced options necessary for your day to day needs. Many people are very satisfied with what Office 2003 or 2007 can do under CrossOver, but those that require more from the Office suite are not overjoyed at this point. This is why Office 2003 and 2007 are not rated at a gold level.

We have high hopes and expectations that one day CrossOver will be able to do most if not all of the functions Office 2003 & 2007 can do natively, but this takes a lot of time (and money and effort). We believe that the CrossOver 7.x series is our best yet and it is still getting better.

We would all love to be able to say that X distro is the issue at hand for the functionality issues, but this is just not the case.

I would like to assure you that we will continue to do our best. We have our eyes set on IMAP and many other features (macros, equation editor, the list simply goes on and on).

Thank you for your feedback.

Caron Wills wrote:

Our sincerest apologies...

Hold on guys. You have done a great job with Crossover. I am a scientist too and I use Crossover and office 2003 for my work. Currently the spreadsheets I work with are about as big as excel can handle and they work fine. Yes, there are some bits and pieces that need work, but overall it is a great piece of software.

To the OP. This sounds like a bug that may even be Ubuntu specific. Try the following.

In the terminal type 'sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf'

and check for the line that reads:

vm.mmap_min_addr = 65536

If you find it change to

vm.mmap_min_addr = 0

Then restart.

What is the situation exactly with Word 2003? How much of it could I expect
to work on this software? I run a proprietary .dot file called Wordembed
for embedded indexing in multifile documents. I would like to get away from
the arms race between Microsoft and the cybercriminal community, whereby
defensive updates cause as much trouble as the exploits they are supposed
to defend against. I assume that I need VBA to be working, as well as update
labelling of Word documents.

Is there an assessment of how much of Word works on Crossover?

Regards

John Sampson

John, I recommend to download our demo and see how your .dot file works in CrossOver.

What it essentially comes down to is that each VBA script or .dot file is a sort of unsupported application. As such it may or may not work. The good news here is that they are similar to code in a supported app(MS Office), which makes them more likely to run. On the other had, VBA scripts often do broken and nasty things, which may break on CrossOver.

Hello -

This reply is to the most recent post in this thread (27 Nov).

So far I do not actually run Linux - if it needs experimentation
to find out what works I should probably leave it for the time
being. It might be worth your saying up front that only parts of
Microsoft Office work on Crossover/Linux, then visitors would
not be disappointed when they dig further into the matter.

Regards

John Sampson

Up until very recently Office 2007 has worked without any serious hitches here.

On Ubuntu Ibex, the only thing I notice is that window maximize/minimize is somewhat broken, and (I'm on a dual-display here with proprietary Nvidia drivers), when I click on a window, it will "jump" to the right about one full display's length. I'm still gripping the window, and can drag it around, but my mouse is on the left, and the actual window is on the right. Very weird. Best I can tell, the coordinates from the mouse aren't being grabbed properly, thus the consistent, precise jump to the right.

That, and suddenly I can't use attachments in Outlook, which is why I'm on the forums this morning, but I have to agree - you have a general system issue. This isn't just CrossOver causing you grief.