I recently purchased Crossover Office 4.1 after having a great experience with their 3.x version. While OpenOffice.org has been doing great for me, there’s always that need to natively open and edit a Word or Excel doc (although I miss the export to PDF button that OO has). I just got the install of Office done tonight, and it always amazes me how much faster Microsoft’s own apps run on Linux than on Windoze. Crossover is definitely worth the $30 if you have the need (it has great Outlook support too for those of you still chained to that app).
What really surprised me is that I got MS Money 2004 to install. Crossover doesn’t have “certified” support for Money, but a few people have gotten it to work – I guess I’m now among those lucky few. As somebody who is absolutely reliant on my personal finance package, this rocks. I did stumble across a little hack that made the install function though… When I did a normal install it hung on me. As part of my attempt to kill the processes I killed what appeared to be the main process (wine-server?) that seemed to un-hang the install. Anyway, I’m a happy man and have no problem paying for software like Crossover Office.
