MS Office in Qubes?

User Support General
1

Unfortunately the world demands me to use MS Office and I am not in a position to negotiate :face_with_steam_from_nose:

I don’t want to run a full Windows VM so what could be my alternatives?

I ask because this is probably a common issue. Did people find that Wine or something like that worked? With which version of Office?

I have seen this Winboat talked about as working

Could this be installed on a debian minimal or something?

Or are there plugins or ways to get open or libre office to be able to edit, and save in the same format MS Word or Excell documents?

Looks like a few options out there.

2

I’ve stuck with a windows vm. I havent found a better way yet.

Winboat is just a windows vm running in docker. Performance will be poor in a debian minimal qube as Qubes does not support nested virtualization.

I did see an article recently that the founder of bottles got office 365 installed and working, but that version doesn’t seem to be released yet.

3

Possible without plugins.

You can use Microsoft office web version?

P.S.
For enterprise Microsoft 365 deployments, note that the service gathers substantial OS telemetry, enforces compliance policies to restrict unauthorized devices, and enables SOC teams to monitor and identify suspicious activity originating from your environment.

4

2007+2010 are supposed to work with wine without any issues.
2013+2016+2019 might work with winetricks and some guides.
2021+365 are probably not working.

5

I think your best bet is a VM with Windows. Alternatively, M$ Office Online or OnlyOffice, the latter if format compatibility is the only thing that’s necessary.

6

My understanding is that ReactOS will now run MS Office up to version 2010, but until Qubes-windows-tools runs on ReactOS, it’s probably better to just use Codeweavers.com CrossOver® Linux ($74). Yes, it’s better to use Libre software when possible, but you’ll be paying for Microsoft Office anyway. With Codeweavers, you are at least using the Wine infrastructure and adding to the ongoing Libre infrastructure. The Wine project does benefit from what Codeweavers is doing.

Edit: Just checked Codeweavers compatibility with Office, and it appears that Office 2024 still does not install, so an older version of Office will still be required.

7

Thx. I will see if this works for my needs.

8

Check also Euro-Office · GitHub

9

anything newer than 2010 would be ugly (unless you wait for qwt-ng to become production ready)

composite windows are huge problem

10

LibreOffice does most of the tasks for MS Office, including openning .docx files, but if true MS Office needs to be used, I’d go with separate Win VM. I’m actually using it for mandatory accounting software and also for adobe products as well. Playing with wine and other workaround are waste of time. Wine is good for simple win programs, anything complicated can’t be run with it.

11

OnlyOffice + MS Fonts. See: Installing Microsoft Fonts in Fedora Template - #5 by alannis

12

As I mentioned above, 2010 runs really well. Unlike Libre it is FAST.

13

Are you able to open docx from latest MSOffice with this?

14

I tried this as well and in the end i had to work with a windows VM, it was the solutiom with the least headaches

15

Having said that, libreoffice comes a long way as well. But i get it in business settings you probably cant get around office 365

16

If you are looking for an alternative for Adobe software, someone made very similar programs with Claude. I have looked at the alternative to the Acrobat reader and also MS Word. And they are nearly identical but without bloat, spyware, account nonsense and they are free and open source:

I haven’t used the premium products of Adobe but I heard that the open source alternatives are very good.