I want to get word, excel, powerpoint, onedrive and copilot on ubuntu, anyone know how?
Web apps
Seconding this, webapp-manager is what linux mint comes with and is the best option so far
I also saw someone on YouTube launching Word via wine so I guess it’s also an option
According to the official AppDB in winehq.org, getting this to work seems to be strongly dependent on the specific version.
PlayOnLinux takes care of it for you. Office 2013 supposedly works very well, Office 2016 can be sometimes buggy. For the 2016 version you need to get the 32 bit iso.
I think I saw Word 2010 running. Idk about other versions
Probably, as this version is supposed to have platinum support.
2010 is EOL
I’ve never seen any issues with it. People here used MS Office 2007 until like 2019. It should be fine as long as it supports docx and the document doesn’t have complicated scripts (which nobody uses here so can’t tell about them)
That’s is a bad idea as the old Office doesn’t receive security patches
Well this is true but again if you use MS apps, you probably should just use Windows
Do people even still target ancient versions?
I still use Office 97 and 2000. Works fine for what I need
Still a bad idea. I didn’t say they didn’t work what I said is that it is a major security risk. There are people who still run Windows XP and it works for them. However, it is also a security risk.
using it and using it successfully with others is a different story.
OnlyOffice has fantastic support for Microsoft originated documents. I typically use the Flatpak version. The look and feel is very similar to the office suite so you should be “right at home”.
You don’t (sorry)
The flowchart is as follows:
LibreOffice or OnlyOffice for desktop apps (no, they are not Microsoft apps, but yes they use Microsoft formats and can edit and save Microsoft documents/spreadsheets/etc). OnlyOffice is the closest of the two to the Windows experience.
If you really aren’t open to using alternative software (which is strange given that you’re using Linux), then the web apps exist. I’ve heard they’re really close to the actual desktop suite, though I don’t have any interest in ever using them as we have very good free and open source alternatives available (see above).
If the web apps don’t cut it for you, then you can run the official apps in a VM, or maybe through WINE. Here’s the WINE DB page for Microsoft Office, which lists various Office versions and their level of compatibility through WINE.
Copilot will likely not be possible to secure on Linux in a standalone desktop app (unless someone somewhere hacked something together through Electron to use a web version). Another user said that Copilot is available inside Microsoft Edge, so I suppose you could install that, though I’d highly discourage that. Reliance on LLMs is quite frankly a plague to society, and often feeds incorrect, biased, or purely fabricated responses, as LLMs merely attempt to predict what word is most likely to occur next based on a set of training data, none of which was vetted for accuracy, racism, zionism, sexism, etc. LLMs like copilot do not have any form of intelligence, and do not understand what they are saying. I highly recommend you just use a search engine in your browser, because it’ll feed you the same info all the LLMs were trained on anyway.OneDrive recently received native support in GNOME, so I think you should be able to access it in your settings under accounts/connected services (whatever GNOME calls it nowadays)? I’ve never tried to use it, so other people will know better than I will there, but it should be possible to use.
libre office not being a smart arse either. it’s the easiest way. i am making some assumptions however. i assume you are a full on Linux user at home and have to deal with MS Office documents of various types at work or some other reason. you can work on that document at work un MS Office. bring it home and work on it some more in libre office. and back again.
Idk if this has been proven, but I’m certain that the current desktop versions of Office apps are just Electron-style wrappers for the web versions. I switched from Windows to Linux about a year ago and have found the web apps to be perfectly sufficient
In my opinion the web apps are better. i work for two companies using their own IT setups; at both, the installed W10 apps suck. They get stuck and lag or struggle to scroll to data im searching etc. The web app always works as expected, assuming your internet is good
If so, they’re pretty good at covering it up. You can usually tell Electron apps from how they behave (mousing over any clickable UI elements turns into a hand on Electron but native apps usually don’t, etc.) but I’ve always thought that Office apps, including the latest, are native.
Its pretty clear that old Outlook is native and the new Outlook is Electron just based on how it feels.
My reason to use M$ Office was Visual Basic which didn’t work on Libre Office and that doesn’t work in the web apps either.
I have a Windows VM on my server. If I need MS Office or any Windows-only program I just use Remmina to RDP in and get stuff done.
Windows has pretty good touch support over RDP so I can even do this from my phone or tablet if I need a full desktop on the go (using a VPN).
Have you tried an oldie but goodie called winapps? It still works now and lets you use remote rdp to windows to show each specific program as a window on your linux desktop
Yes! I’ve used that before.
I spun up a trial version of Windows Server and tried to get it working. It seemed to want a Domain environment and I didn’t want to go down that road. There probably is a way to do it without setting up a Domain but I didn’t feel like messing with it at the time.
The domain can be “localhost”. You just need to forward the RDP port from your host to the Windows guest.
Hmm… for me on a regular windows vm it works though, weird
Maybe something I should look into again.
You could use libreoffice apps and then convert it to Microsoft formats to share with your coworkers.
I tried this once and it deleted 3 hours worth of comments on a Word doc. Never again
Your best option would be to use onlyoffice. Not sure what you mean by copilot. Copilot is available in vscode, vim, jetbrains, all of which are cross platform. You can also try using bavarder if you want something like chatgpt.
I personally use a small tool called mods to access gpt 4 using an openai API key in my terminal, but this option is only great if you have a terminal heavy workflow.
copilot is the new “Cortana”, they’re pushing it to windows 10 and 11.
Also, make sure to install MS Fonts. Otherwise there’s a good chance sharing documents with Windows users will mess up formatting. I learned that the hard way.
Buy CrossOver for Linux. Positive side effect: you support Wine development.
Another person already answered about the office apps so I won’t mention it. What I know is that the most recent version of GNOME has OneDrive support so Ubuntu 24.04 should have it. Copilot is impossible to get. Also if you use the Microsoft suite, you probably should be running Windows. There’s not that much point in switching to Linux in this case
Linux is not only about privacy. It’s primarily about freedom.
the most recent version of GNOME has OneDrive support
Just to check, do you mean the Microsoft version of Onedrive, or the abraunegg Linux version?
Abraunegg’s version is brilliant, but the MS version would make my life easier :)
It is the Gnome Online Accounts version.
Thanks :)
I take it that’s a third party client that syncs with MS Onedrive?
Correct, it is one of multiple that are available, it just happens to be built into Gnome. It also syncs with Google Drive and some others.
Ah, I know the one. I’ve used it for Google Drive in the past. I didn’t know it could do Onedrive too though.
I didn’t understand the question. Afaik there is no official OneDrive app for Linux
A developer, Abraunegg, has made a Linux tool that syncs a Microsoft Onedrive account with a Linux system, in the same way that the Microsoft Onedrive tool does on Windows. They’ve named their tool Onedrive too.
I didn’t know if you were talking about Microsoft Onedrive compatibility in Gnome, or Abraunegg’s Onedrive. It gets a bit confusing when they both have the same name.
I don’t remember hearing anything about the Abraunegg’s version so I think GNOME made their own implementation or used another base
That makes sense, thanks :)
If you are brave and have time: Wine
Office 365 on the web works well on Linux if that has enough functionality for you. If not, the only way to get a modern version of the real Microsoft Office is in a VM. Older versions will run over Wine.
As far as alternatives go, OnlyOffice has the best reputation for file compatibility. I use LibreOffice and am very happy with it.
Avoid OpenOffice. It is really just an ancient version of LibreOffice.
Try fmstrat/winapps it’s installation process is well documented and it works relatively well. In case you don’t need too much functionality (e.g. complex formatting/custom template/a ton of custom add-ons) the online version might work for you. There’s also a web app for teams you can find on flathub iirc. Betterbird also gives you a ton of options and with owl addin it handles exchange pretty well and also gives you access to the teams web app directly inside betterbird
VirtualBox?
Virtualizing the whole windows OS right inside Linux I think it’s the best option if you want to use the M$ ecosystem.
Don’t use Virtual box for that. Use KVM with Virtio (you will need the virtio drivers from Fedora)
They are both viable options that have different advantages.
VBox has a nice friendly GUI.
KVM is fast & efficient.there is also Virt-Manager and quickemu with quickgui, if you want friendly GUI though.
