(Updated 2012-06-03)

The Wine versions below are known to have regressions that affect Office 2003. Do not try to install in them:

• 1.3.13—1.5.1: some versions of the installer have been reported to crash immediately (bug  26358). It is not clear what versions might be affected.
  
• 1.3.14 through 1.3.18: standard install works fine (for installers not affected by bug 26358), but advanced customization is not possible
• 1.3.5 through 1.3.7
­
• 1.3.2­­
• 1.1.39 through 1.2-rc3: while the installer works fine in these versions, there was a regression (bug 22725) that caused Excel to crash if data was entered in two adjacent columns. Do not use these versions if you need Excel.
­
• ­1.­1.35: while the installer works fine in this version, there was a regression (bug 21071) that prevented saving files in Word. Do not use this version if you need Word.­  ­
• 1.1.17 through 1.1.23
• 1.1.1 and 1.1.2
• 1.1.2 through 1.1.9  (German and Spanish versions of Office 2003)
  

­­(Updated:2012-06-25)

Many of the instructions for installing Office 2003 that can be fo­und on various websites are badly outdated.

Current versions of Wine do not­ require any overrides to in­stall Office 2003 Pro.  Install as you would in Windows: insert the cd and run setup.exe. ­­

Note: if you have 64 bit Wine instal­led, you must create a 32 bit wineprefix for Office 2003 using the WINEARCH=win32 environment variable. ­

Do not report bugs for the installer if you have used any overrides.  ­

If you are using a version of Wine older than 1.4, you should upgrade to either the current stable or development release. 

Once Office 2003 is installed, set the following overrides in winecfg:

• riched20: set to native; needed for the thesaurus
• gdiplus: for ­1.1.38 and later, set to native, builtin. This override is not needed for earlier versions of Wine, as prior to 1.1.38 the default behavior was to favor gdiplus that was installed ­by the app itself. If using native gdiplus causes Office apps to crash, the most likely cause is nonconformant ttf fonts installed on your system. (Ubuntu in particular is known to be afflicted.) Run winetricks fontfix to fix this.

It is not necessary to install these dlls, as Office installs its own version. These overrides should not be set globally unless Office is installed in a separate wineprefix. If other apps are installed in the same wineprefix as Office, set the overrides individually for Office apps.

The above overrides are needed for all Office 2003 applications. Check the AppDB entries for the individual Office applications for any additional, application-specific tweaks that may be needed.

1. Test in a clean wineprefix with plain Wine.
2. Specify exactly which edition of Office 2003 you tested (Standard, Pro, etc.) This is crucial--bugs that affect one edition may not affect others.
3. Specify exactly what type of install you tested (Typical, Custom, Minimal, etc.)
4. Limit your report to the installer only. Reports on the performance of individual apps should be filed under their respective AppDB entries. Problems with running any of the apps should only be mentioned if it is clear that it is due to a problem with the installer.
   
5. If you used any overrides during the install, please list them and explain exactly what problem each override was needed to solve. 

Test reports that do not follow these guidelines will be rejected.