http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/16798.html

To copy one of these apps to run on Linux?

I can definitely see a need for Act and QuickBooks.  I'm not sure about the rest.

There's sporadic howling from some AutoCAD users but they have Buckley's chance of gatting a Linux or Apple port from Autodesk. I see no attraction unless Office and VBA is already there waiting.

Office and VBA is there waiting. You can run them just fine.

Colm: I didn't know that. Are you referring to an Office clone running natively on Linux or MS Office running on (say) Wine?

Codeweavers (guys who made WINE) created crossover office which makes office run semi-natively on Linux. There are a bunch of other apps which run pretty well too.

http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/

Good luck in getting Linux users to pay for it.

*shrug*

They can just queue it up along with their latest West Wing torrents if they don't feel like paying.

I've never used the official one from Codeweavers.  I think it's cheap, like 75-125 buckaroos.

I've tried the free version of Wine with MS Office and tried a lot of things and got further each time, but it never fully installed, complained about whatever.  That FOSS version of it was a major disappointment to me. 

That's the flip-side of free, you can't really garner much sympathy if it doesn't work out for you.

There's a lot of comments on this thread now, if you scroll down through it:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8849

The time you wasted trying to get it to run with WINE is probably worth more than the $40 it would cost you to purchase crossover.