Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint won't save or open files

Solution 1:

Here are the steps needed to install Microsoft Office on Linux (in my case Office Pro 2007, Ubuntu 11.10 with gnome-shell)

1. Install Wine 1.3
2. Install Wine Tricks
3. Right click on office.exe file
4. Wine walks you through installation
5. Open Wine Tricks, select the default prefix
6. Click Add Windows dll
7. Add riched20 and riched30
8. Open Wine configure
9. Click Add Application, navigate to the individual .exe files (e.g. winword.exe, excel.exe)
10. For those applications, hit the drop down menu and select Windows XP, making Wine emulate Windows XP just for office programs.

Solution 2:

Wine has a database of applications that may work properly in Wine with or without any required tweaks. Please check it first, whether MS Office 2007 needs any additional setup or not.

I have not tried MS Office in Ubuntu (or any other GNULinux distro) since alternative office suites like LibreOffice.org, OpenOffice.org are already there. And they work better, at least for me.

:)

References:
microsoft office not properly working in wine
How well does Microsoft Office Excel work in Wine?

Solution 3:

With Wine 1.4 and above you can open and save files. If you have an older version, please upgrade:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.5

If it doesn't work, remove your $HOME/.wine folder and follow these instructions: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=4992

If it still doesn't work, try upgrading to another edition.

Note that Microsoft Office 2010 works very well, and I can open and save my files.