Crossover Office

I had to use Office 2003 for some of my school work. I took an Access course, so had to use Office 2003. I have been using OpenOffice.org for all my papers and any writing I need to do. I registered and paid for my next courses and started working on my reimbursement paperwork. What do I find? The forms I have to fill in won't work in OpenOffice.

So I started looking around and downloaded Crossover Office. I got the 30 day free trial. Since I'm using Ubuntu, I did have to set up my system to allow logging in as root. After downloading, I found it's just a script that gets run. I had to run it several times. I ran it first as sudo and the script told me that I couldn't run it as sudo. I then used "su -" and the script told me that I was not able to use this because root does not have display settings configured. I then ran it with "su" and it worked just fine. Installed without any errors.

Next thing that needed done is installing whatever you need to run. I picked Office 2003 from the list and told it where to install from. Again, I had to do this 2 times. The first time, the program informed me that because it's a Windows CD, there are hidden files that the CD-ROM could not see. It then offered to fix this problem itself. I usually wouldn't allow a program to "fix" my system, but it spelled out exactly what was going to happen. All it needed to do was edit my fstab file. It modified the file and I was able to install Office 2003 without a hitch. I'm curious if Office will expire or not.

Will I buy Crossover Office? Maybe, it all depends on how often I use it.