Microsoft Office (installer only)

What works

Almost everything works as it should, this is true for the 32bit Office 2010 installer and the Office 2010 applications. One Note 2010 should be also capable to function properly but it has not been tested more thoroughly.

I have installed the regular Office 2010 Home & Student (incl. SP1) version in a 64bit Wine 6.0.1 prefix under Kubuntu 20.04 LTS.

The installation through the regular 32bit Microsoft Office 2010 installer went almost perfectly. No error was found.

Note, I encountered a very strange problem on newer PC systems with multiple CPUs. Despite many attempts, I was not able to install Office 2010 on a AMD Ryzen 7 5700U based system. This Zen II based CPU contains 8 CPU cores which can proceed up to 16 threads. The Office installer always crashed at the 50% mark. I really have tried EVERYTHING to work around this. No success. I finally switched to a low-end Acer Netbook. It contains an AMD Athlon II Neo K145 CPU which is a single core processor. And what can I say? The installation of Office 2010 worked absolutely perfectly from the beginning. I deleted the prefix an tried it again. The Office 2010 installer worked with the exactly same tweaks mentioned below again and again perfectly well.

So there exist really a strange problem on newer multi-CPU based systems. The only workaround is to use an older single or dual-core PC and prepare the Wine prefix there. Afterwards I compressed the whole prefix to an gz archive .wine.tar.gz and copied it onto the new computer. This worked perfectly well and after the installation of the Office 2010 service pack 2 also the Start Menu entries were again present. Maybe this behavior described here is related to bug 45208.

What does not

Microsoft Office Picture Manager refuses to start so it doesn't work.

Workarounds

Some winetricks tweaks are still needed to get the Office 2010 programs working. 

(Note, it is strongly recommended to use the latest version from the winetricks website, not that one of the repo.)

At first I created a new Wine prefix:

WINEARCH=win64 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine winecfg

Before the installation I added:

winetricks -q mfc100

winetricks -q msxml6

After the successful installation I added:

winetricks -q riched20

Note, there may exist at the first startup some problems with the graphics and maybe also a black window. In such cases the "Office 2013 black window fix" can be applied, open regedit through winetricks and go into the tree HKCU\Software\Wine\.

Generate a new key with the name Direct3D and add a dword with name MaxVersionGL. Define the value with 30002 (hexa). The full value will be 0x00030002 (196610).

After these the Office 2010 applications should work almost perfectly well.

If there still exists some problem with the graphics, try to install the native "gdiplus.dll" through winetricks:

winetricks -q gdiplus

Sometimes it is needed to play with the gdiplus.dll settings, try also to change it in winecfg back to *gdiplus to Builtin, Native and vice versa.

Final note, I was also able to install flawlessly the latest Office 2010 service pack 2, SP2. So if possible, it is strongly recommended to install the Office 2010 SP2.

What was not tested

Almost everything was tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: AMD
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

During the Office setup, I excluded all the .NET plugins for the office apps, the hosted webs support, the Office Download links and the SharePoint services plugin. I have also manually upgraded the Wine Mono package to version 6.4.1. This seems to work fine with Office 2010, and it looks to work better then the original Microsoft one. So do not use in newer wine versions the winetricks dotnet20 argument.

1. Test in a clean wineprefix, using plain Wine. 
   
2. Specify exactly which edition of Office 2010 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. ­

­(2017-04-10)

These instructions assume you are familiar with the basics of using Wine and Linux, including running apps from the command line. If you are new to Wine and/or Linux, before proceeding further please familiarize yourself with the information in the FAQ, particularly the sections on creating a 32 bit wineprefix, running an installer, and using wineprefixes.

1. Make sure all dependencies of Wine are installed on your system, including wine-mono and winbind.
2. If installing a volume-licensed copy of Office 2010 that requires MAK activation, please read the note below for the workaround for bug 30033. 
3. Create a clean 32 bit wineprefix for Office 2010 (use WINEARCH=win32 if on a 64 bit system).
4. For Wine 2.2 and later, set the Windows version to XP. (For older versions, the default was XP, and should not be changed.)
5. Install Office 2010 to the newly-created wineprefix simply by running the installer. 

After installing, set riched20 to native, builtin in winecfg to enable Powerpoint to start and selection boxes to display correctly.

• Do not use winetricks; Office installs its own riched20 to a private directory.
• This override may be set globally if Office is installed to a separate wineprefix (recommended).
• If other applications are installed to the wineprefix (strongly discouraged), either set the override individually for each Office application, or set riched20 to builtin individually for the non-Office applications, as non-Office applications will not be able to find the riched20 installed by Office.
  

 (2012-06-04)

Office Professional Plus does not require .NET to be installed, but if it detects that it is installed, it will look for a machine.config file. This will fail on Wine versions without wine-mono installed (i.e., versions prior to 1.5.6).

The recommended solution is to install wine-mono. The instructions below are provided solely for those who are unable to upgrade to a version of Wine supporting wine-mono.

There are two ways to work around this without installing wine-mono:

1. Copy a machine.config file from a native Mono install to the wineprefix's drive_c/windows/Microsoft.NET/Framework/v2.0.50727/CONFIG directory. 
   
2. Delete all .NET-related registry keys.
   

Installing winetricks dotnet20 will also work around the bug; however, because that will install native dlls that may cause other problems, it is not recommended.

The above workarounds must be done before running the installer. If you do not, and the installer fails, you must delete that wineprefix and start fresh, as the rollback process leaves behind something that prevents subsequent attempts from succeeding, even with one of the workarounds applied. Note also that a rolled-back install leaves running processes that must be killed manually. 

(2018-01-07)

There are known regressions affecting the Office 2010 installer in the versions of Wine listed below. Do not attempt to install in them.

• 2.18--3.0-rc4 (bug 44036)
• 1.5.18
• 1.3.30

In addition, Office 2010 is not installable in any version prior to 1.3.9; this includes all 1.2.x versions.

1) Copy the CD content to a folder on your computer

2) Find the folder named "Standard.WW" (or ProPlus.WW or whatever your version name)

3) Inside that folder should be a file named config.xml. 

4) Edit config.xml and make sure that it has the following:

Configuration Product="Standard" (or ProPlus)

PIDKEY Value="XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" (use your actual serial key here)

Setting Id="AUTO_ACTIVATE" Value="1" 

/Configuration

Each of the above lines in the config.xml file should be between angled brackets, which unfortunately can't be shown here because the AppDB will not display anything between angled brackets. If you are unsure how it should look, see bug 30033 for an example with the brackets.

5) Save the config.xml file and run the installer..

1. Test in a clean wineprefix, using plain Wine. 
2. Specify exactly which edition of Office 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.