Ubuntu: Up and Running

Chapter 16. Using Wine

Although Ubuntu supports a wealth of different applications, spanning just about any subject you can think of, there are still occasions when it may not completely meet your needs. For example, OpenOffice.org is a fully featured office suite, providing all the functions you would expect and that exist in other similar applications such as Microsoft Office. And it can even read and write Office files. But it isn’t totally compatible with Office, because many documents display and print differently in the two packages.

And why should OpenOffice.org be fully compatible? It’s a completely different program that’s been independently developed and approaches things in different ways that are completely logical in its own frame of reference. Once you get used to it, you can produce documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that are easily the equal of any you can create in Office.

But what if you have to collaborate on documents with someone who uses Office, while you use OpenOffice.org? You will almost certainly find that you both introduce changes that don’t display correctly on each other’s computers. They may be little things like changed tab settings, different page lengths, and so on, but these little things are also time-consuming to fix.

The simple solution to this problem is to install Office on Ubuntu using the Wine program (see Figure 16-1), which stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator—a typically recursive acronym, much loved by software developers. ...