I just wrote an update to this entire page – go here and forget about this page!

Major Woes

I tried to install Office 2010 using PlayOnLinux – on PopOS 18.04 (essentially, Ubuntu 18.04) – over and over, having read everything I could find on the web about installing Office 2010 with PlayOnLinux and it failed repeatedly. Specifically, what happened is that the install routine would finish, create desktop icons, etc. – ever indication was that everything had gone fine. When I tried to launch Word, for instance, the GUI would open and a second or so later the installer graphic would appear again, in the middle of the screen, and everything would simply hang. I couldn’t close Word without using the “Kill Processes” button in PlayOnLinux.

A lot of screwing around, and success

This is what I did, and, I am writing this for my own benefit – I would not recommend following these steps as some may be superfluous, etc. I have no idea why in the hell this worked. In desperation, this is what I recall doing – and these were a mash up of suggested fixes that I’d found on a variety of pages around the web:

• I installed Wine 3.8 from the PlayOnLinux GUI, but, when I eventually installed Office it said it was downloading version 3.2, as I recall.
• I used the PlayOnLinux GUI to create a new bottle – I called it simply “32bit” – not sure where I got this idea…..this has been an ordeal.
• On that bottle I installed msxml6, dotnet20, and riched20
• Then I created another bottle called “Office2010” – I knew this was the name of the bottle that was normally created by the PlayOnLinux installer for Office 2010.
• I installed the same components in this bottle that I just listed (above) in this new bottle.
• I ran the installer from a mounted ISO file and I was asked if I wanted to completely delete or overwrite the existing bottle named “Office2010”.
• I chose to overwrite the existing bottle and the damned thing seems to have worked – I have no idea why….

Again: These Are Notes to Myself

This post is not a guideline for going about installing Office 2010 on Linux using PlayOnLinux. I have never heard of anyone having the specific problem I had with all of this, and, creating a bottle called “32bit” was something I did – and I can’t recall why – that was certainly superfluous…. Nonetheless, I had such a bad time with this thing that I thought it best to document every stupid thing I did. . As I’ve said, from what I could find I had some unique problem, that, through a lot of screwing around eventually got fixed – and I really don’t know why.