The forum

Not as hard as it appears?

Installing MS Office 2007 on MacBook Air

Author Replies
skris88 Monday 31 October 2016 at 7:15
skris88Anonymous

Hopefully my experience here will help non-tech users.

I found Play on Linux and Play on Mac (PoL and PoM) by accident.  

I'm mainly a Google Apps (gSuite) fanboy so I get by with a Chromebook, but this is for my partner..... There is a "need" to use Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint on this Macbook Air, so I started looking at Wine. Big fail!

I then I erased the SSD and installed Microsoft Windows 10 and then MS Office.  Because the hardware drivers were not optimised, the laptop ran hot. Not hot as in speed, but the CPU went ballistic - the fan was running constantly. Obviously unusable for the long term.

I put the Macbook Air on eBay.

Then I found PoM.

So I decided to reinstall macOS (had to run Window's CLEANDISK command in DiskPart first) and try PoM (and cancelled my eBay sale - but I would have had to reinstall Mac OS anyway).

The Wiki was not helpful for a newbie like me. Even though I understand strange tools like Microsoft's DiskPart, it was unclear how to install Office 2007 with PoM.  I had copied the DVD onto a USB drive, but the PoM installation failed with errors like where I had installed word.exe and excel.exe, then a WinXP service pack download - with little explaination on what it was I was doing wrong.

I then cleaned up the USB drive, keeping only the one install folder and the one setup.exe and ran PoM selecting a special Manual installation.  

It worked!

So if you're struggling with PoL or PoM you can try this too, no additional libraries were installed.

Word, Excel and Powerpoint run.  Whether they can save and print, I have no idea yet; am also using Chrome on Mac OS  - Chrome found my LAN printer and printed perfectly.  Hopefully PoM will allow the same. 

I think it's time for a PayPal Donation!

Thanks everone.

Cheers,
skris88