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I've tried running MS Office through wine but it failed to install correctly. As for LibreOffice it has some limitations when it comes to writing equations which is important for me seeing how I'm a training to become a mathematician next year. I'll also need high-level formatting tools. Which office suite would best suit my needs taking into consideration the aforementioned problems/requirements?

Zanna
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Josh Pinto
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    Perhaps you should take a look at this question [http://askubuntu.com/questions/206344/how-to-type-all-the-math-stat-greek-equations-efficiently-in-libreoffice] – cnavigator Dec 13 '12 at 16:23
  • Also I think you should edit the title to mention specifically the need for writing math equations, because as it is now, that's too broad. – cnavigator Dec 13 '12 at 16:27
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    Not an answer to your question, but math goes hand in hand quite well with Latex – Nanne Dec 13 '12 at 16:38
  • LaTeX, yeah, I know. I've tried Lyx Document Processor just wondering if there's anything better on Ubuntu than it. – Josh Pinto Dec 13 '12 at 16:39
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    Small piece of advice: If you're seriously considering studying math you will have to learn how to use Latex. It is the de-facto standard in that field. – Glutanimate Dec 13 '12 at 17:50
  • I know that I am well-educated in LaTeX already. In fact I used to use LaTeX to type equations more efficiently in MS Word when I used it on my Windows 7 OS. My previous comment was about if there's any better LaTeX editors or for that matter any office suites with equation editors that are better. – Josh Pinto Dec 13 '12 at 17:59

4 Answers4

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On my Ubuntu 12.10, I installed Microsoft Office 2007 normally through the latest version of wine.

Try installing it and then try installing Microsoft Office again.

In a terminal type: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa followed by sudo apt-get update and finally sudo apt-get install wine1.5

Try installing Office again.

If a normal install fails, try installing office through Winetricks.

To Do
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  • I've tried all you've described and it failed. It was MS Office 2007 too. – Josh Pinto Dec 13 '12 at 23:39
  • I installed Office 2007 home and student edition english language from a CD on a 64 bit Ubuntu 12.10. If you do not have other wine programs installed, try deleting your .wine folder in home and try again. – To Do Dec 13 '12 at 23:50
  • I do have other wine programs installed firstly, secondly I'm running 32 bit. Perhaps that makes a difference. – Josh Pinto Dec 13 '12 at 23:55
  • I had installed the same version of office on 12.04 32 bit using winetricks Office 2007 Pro option. – To Do Dec 14 '12 at 00:02
  • Oh hey mate! I retried it and it worked with wine tricks! I'll accept your answer! – Josh Pinto Dec 14 '12 at 00:13
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Use Kingsoft Ofiice (includes word, spreadsheet & presentation)

Tanmoy Saha
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The best Office Suite on Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions too) is LibreOffice. It gets a "Math" module for editing equations (LibreOffice Math). If your not satisfied, you get alternatives such as Apache OpenOffice (which is very close of LibreOffice) and eventually the Calligra Suite that may integrate well with the KMath KDE software.

Josh Pinto
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air-dex
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  • Interesting how you mentioned Apache OpenOffice I've tried getting it -- you can't on 12.10. It did work on 12.04 and when I used it its equation editor was identical to that of LibreOffice and as insufficient. As for Calligra its formula editor is inadequate. – Josh Pinto Dec 13 '12 at 23:15
  • It is possible to install AOO on 12.10. If you need help on how to do so, ask at the AOO forum. –  Dec 14 '12 at 02:50
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For formulas, the best tool is probably LaTeX. Actually nearly all scientific publications are written with LaTeX, and the excellent typesetting of formulas is one of the reasons. Nevertheless, it's wygiwyw, so formatting is tedious. On the other hand, if one has a template done, one doesn't have to care about formatting any more, no matter how long the document gets.

There is also a scrip for the command line, called latexit, that renders a formula passed to it as argument into a graphic file.

soulsource
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