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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 on Linux with Bordeaux

About Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 is the essential software suite for home computer users and includes 2007 versions of Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and OneNote.  This system enables you to quickly and easily create great-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, and organize your notes and information in one place, making it easier and more enjoyable for you to get things done.  This updated version features a new streamlined user interface that exposes commonly used commands, enhanced graphics, and formatting capabilities that let you create high-quality documents, plus a powerful note and information organization tool, and more reliability and security with the document inspector tool and improved automatic document recovery.  With these enhancements, Home and Student 2007 makes it a pleasure to complete schoolwork and other tasks at home. 

Create High-Quality Documents
Home and Student 2007 gives you access to updated graphics, formatting galleries, and an intuitive user interface that exposes commonly used commands.  These features enable you to easily produce high-quality documents that will make you proud.  Improved picture, charting, and graphics tools help you produce better-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations more quickly, while a large library of standard charts, quick formatting tools, and SmartArt diagrams make it easy to include rich and stunning visuals and charts.  The results-oriented user interface makes it easier for you to find and use product features so you can enhance your documents according to your specifications.  More stable bullets and numbers, SmartArt diagrams, and graphics and charting galleries provide you with a wealth of other formatting choices.  Meanwhile, document themes help ensure a consistent appearance among the documents you create in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, to make working across the programs you use most more convenient.  PowerPoint also features context-sensitive tabs and easy-to-use galleries that make it simple for you to include tables and other graphics in your documents. 

Enhanced Reliability and Security Features
With an improved automatic Document Recovery tool and the new Document Inspector tool for removing personally identifiable information from your documents, Home and Student 2007 helps you work with more confidence and security.  Thanks to these two features, you'll never have to worry about losing documents after a system failure or exposing your personal identification information or unwanted comments to others before sharing your documents. 
User-Friendly Operation Packed with innovative features and improvements, Home and Student 2007 has a streamlined interface and an enhanced Help system, including online tutorials with step-by-step instructions, so you can quickly learn the product and find the answers to your questions.  In addition, command tabs on the results-oriented Ribbon reveal commonly used commands that previously appeared only in lengthy drop-down menus.  The Help system also offers a smooth transition between the Help menu in the Microsoft Office system and Help on the Internet (when connected).  Larger, more informative ScreenTips provide help concerning commands, and the command tabs themselves are context-sensitive, changing automatically depending upon the task that you are trying to complete, so you won't waste time figuring out the appropriate command.  When you need more guidance, online tutorials provide step-by-step instructions for common tasks. 

Organize Notes and Information
Home and Student 2007 includes OneNote, a digital notebook that helps you gather, organize, and search many types of information in one place.  This means you can consolidate typed text, images, audio and video recordings, digital handwritten notes, Web clippings, and more on the same page.  OneNote also provides flexible note-taking tools to help you organize information the way you want.  Categorize important projects or information in a way that makes sense to you, using an easy-to-use layout of notebooks, sections, and pages.  Type or organize content anywhere on the page and track important items with customisable note tags.  To help keep you on track, the powerful Instant Search feature helps you to find information you are looking for quickly.  With it you can even search handwritten notes, the text in images and scanned documents, and spoken words in audio recordings. 

Preview Changes and Spot Trends
Home and Student 2007 saves you time by making it easier to format your Office documents with Live Preview.  This tool lets you quickly preview proposed changes to your document while you're working on it without having to repeatedly search through layers of menus.  Taking a look at your proposed formatting before committing to it lets you experiment without risk and can help minimize future edits.  Excel features highly visual conditional formatting with new data bars, more colourful gradients, and icons that you can use to format data based on specific rules, so you can more easily identify key data trends, which can help you study and prepare written papers or reports. 

Create and Save Custom Slide Layouts
PowerPoint lets you create presentations with ease using pre-built and user-defined custom slide layouts.  With the custom layout feature you can quickly create the precise layout you envision without being bound by one of the prepackaged, standard layouts.  You can then save your custom layout for use in future presentations. 

Broader Distribution of Your Documents
Home and Student 2007's features aren't limited to the work you do at home; they extend to broader distribution of your documents and presentations.  New support for Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) file formats helps ensure increased distribution and sharing of your documents with users on any platform.  This is particularly ideal for either sharing documents with friends and families, or for presenting information and assignments in a computer-integrated class. 

Recover documents lost while working during inopportune system problems through the Document Recovery Tool

About Bordeaux 1.6.0
The Bordeaux Technology Group is a software services and development company specializing in Windows compatibility software.  Users of Linux systems from time to time find themselves in the need to run specialized Windows software.  The Bordeaux suite enables access to these programs and data in a seamless and low cost manner without requiring licensing of Microsoft Technology.  The Bordeaux Group also provides migration services and support for alternative operating systems specializing in Windows compatibility. 

There is a multitude of software developed only for the Windows operating system and even when software vendors port thier applications to another platform, generally it lacks features that the Windows version contains.  The only solution these developers face is to have access to both systems for testing which leads to increased infrastructure demands, and wasted project resources.  If you are vendor interested in supporting your application on Linux or a software user that needs to run a Windows application on Linux or BSD, we can help. 

The cost of Bordeaux 1.6 is $20.00.  Anyone who has purchased Bordeaux in the past six months is entitled to a free upgrade.  Bordeaux comes with six months of upgrades and support and of course a 30-day money back guarantee. 

Go to the Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 trial download site and download the trial downloader the file I downloaded was X12-30107-DLM.exe the Office downloader is only 357.5 KB and takes only a couple seconds to download. 

Now run Bordeaux and select Office 2007 and choose X12-30107-DLM.exe as the installer file.  The downloader will ask if you want to install Gecko and once this is completed the download will start.  The download will be placed in your home directory in %MYDOCS%

If you decide to install Office 2007 at a later time just run Bordeaux again and select the installer in %MYDOCS%

Installing Office 2007

Start Bordeaux and select Office 2007 and when asked for the install location navigate to %MYDOCS% in your home directory and select X12-30107.exe and the install will begin. 

After the install has completed go to Applications > Bordeaux > Run Command (In Alternate Cellar) and run the Bordeaux Cellar Manager.  You will want to select Office 2007 and then Configure.  Wine Configuration will start and then go to Libraries and add usp10.dll and set it to (native,builtin) then click Apply then OK.  You can now exit the Cellar Manager and start using Office 2007. 

Running Office 2007

Their should now be a Wine directory in your Applications Menu, Just navigate to Applications > Wine > Programs > Microsoft Office > and select Microsoft Office Word 2007. 

When you first run Word 2007 the Microsoft Activation Wizard will run and ask you to activate the Trial over the Internet. 

Office 2007 should activate and once this has completed you can start using Office 2007 until the Trial period expires.  I suggest once you activate Office 2007 to exit Word and then start it again before you do any real work as some features wont be fully activated until you re start the program.  The only down side with this Trial is a nag screen will come up asking if you want to convert to the full product each time you start a Office 2007 program. 

Conclusions

If you want to try the new features of Office 2007 before you go ahead with the full purchase this is a good way of doing so on Linux and BSD.  I have installed the Trial many times with Bordeaux 1.6.0 and each time it has activated and run with out any problems.  Also If you purchase Bordeaux 1.6.0 we will support Office Home and Student Trial or the full product at this time. 

Update 03/30/09 : Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 will also run on Free-BSD and PC-BSD with Bordeaux.