I purchased and installed Codeweaver’s CrossOver Office today, a professional repackaging of Wine is not an emulator. I’m finding that none of the Gnu/Linux-native office tools are quite robust enough for import/export of Office documents (though they are getting close), and the vanilla Wine RPMs are not that stable. I do like using Open Office and Gnumeric for creating new documents, but I’m having trouble with a few important client-related documents (and I’m not a purist).

So I decided to try CrossOver. The really cool thing is that it just works, and it’s fast (faster than native it seems). It is a bit weird, though, to see the Word and Excel icons on my Gnome toolbars.