Codeweavers, the principal sponsor of the Wine project, released the commercial version of Wine, Crossover XI. Starting from this release, all previous offerings of Crossover; Pro, Standard, Bundle and Games will be bundled in one product.
Apart from this change in product portfolio, Codeweaver XI brings in a big feature, support for MS Office 2010. I will review how well Crossover XI supports Office 2010 later in this article. Other updates includes numerous bug fixes and improved support for Office 2007.
Highlights of Crossover XI ( adapted from the changelog)
- Based on Wine 1.4
- Support for Microsoft Office 2010
- Support for Quicken 2012
- Unification of CrossOver Games and CrossOver Pro/Standard/Bundle into a single product
- Better registration method
- Added a silent option in the Linux installer
- Implemented detailed error messages for missing packages on Linux
- Better mouse handling on Linux
- Added an error message if CrossOver can’t create a package on Linux
- New Device Independent Bitmap (DIB) engine
- Better audio support
- Better C++ runtime
- Support for uDisk
- CrossOver on Linux’s icons have a higher resolution
- Kioclient uses KDE SC system
- Python 2.x is automatically selected on machines with both Python 3.x and Python 2.x
- RAR file handling support
- Better support for installing Steam games
- Improved support for Internet Explorer 7 and 6
- Many Microsoft Office improvements
- Support for .Net 1.1 Service Pack 1, .Net 2.0 Service Pack 1, .Net 2.0 Service Pack 2, .Net 3.0
- Net 3.5, .Net 3.5 Service Pack 1
- Quicken 2009 and Quicken 2011 fixes
- Improved DirectX 9 installation
- Fixed FreeBSD registration bug
- Better handling of file associations
- Installation window has a close button now
- Better support for the following games: Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2,
Guild Wars, Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, Skyrim, StarCraft II, Star Trek
Online, and Perfect World International - Improved support for the Steam GUI
- Better support for Bidi (right to left text)
- Translations updates
Apart from the improvements to the software, the icons of the application also seemed to have received a facelift.
MS Office 2010 Compatibility
As stated before, Crossover XI earns brownie points for MS Office 2010 support. Installation was pretty straightforward and MS Office Professional Plus was installed in less than 15 mins.
I was able to open Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook, Publisher and OneNote.
I
was able to configure Outlook to the point it asked me the server name
and password. After that Outlook failed to recognize the password and kept asking again and again. It
was weird, as Evolution with Exchage MAPI works with the same account and works
well. In Windows partition, Outlook 2010 also works flawlessly with the
same account.
was able to configure Outlook to the point it asked me the server name
and password. After that Outlook failed to recognize the password and kept asking again and again. It
was weird, as Evolution with Exchage MAPI works with the same account and works
well. In Windows partition, Outlook 2010 also works flawlessly with the
same account.
The support for Office 2010 is still at its preliminary stage I would say. MS Word 2010 crashed when I tried to open a 35 page, 8000 word document(.docx) with heavy graphics. The same document opened perfectly fine in Office 2007 installed in another bottle.
The exact same problem was reproduced with a large Excel file(.xlsx). Excel 2010 crashed while opening the file. Excel 2007 opened the same file with ease.
 |
| Word 2010 |
 |
| Excel 2010 |
Publisher 2010 is unable to handle graphics and templates. If you open a blank document, it opens.
There are improvements to Office 2007 however. Outlook and Word are now more stable. In Word 2007 the thesaurus now works and Outlook 2007 maintains a more reliable connection
with Exchange Servers.
with Exchange Servers.
Other Issues
Upgrading from previous versions of Crossover may cause problems. For example, I upgraded to 11.0 from 10.2 and Office 2010 did not work very well. It kept crashing. After a clean install, including deleting all bottles and configs, things started to appear stable.
Final Words
Looking back at the issues I faced with Office 2010, I would say, it is quite a dampener. I had high hopes from Crossover XI and Office 2010! However, if you a an avid gamer (which I am not btw!) and your game is supported, you may want it.
If you are a paid subscriber you would get this upgrade for free anyway. Be careful while upgrading. It is advisable to create archive bottles for every wine bottle before upgrading.
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