MS- office on Linux

hey friends! May i know if MS-Office is compatible with Linux operating system? If i change the OS from windows XP to linux, will i be able to do my work on Ms-word and MS-excel? thanks in advance for any help

If using linux then Open Office might be the office suite of choice…
Generally Microsoft Office suites are not meant to be run on a Linux system….. however many clever folks in the linux world have come up with "Wine" which allows quite a few windows programs to run pretty successfully under Linux.
For further info, see here:
http://www.winehq.org/
Regards
paws

Most popular Linux distributions, including Ubuntu and OpenSUSE come with Open Office and Firefox pre-installed. Keep in mind that if you have a single-use license of MS Office and it is already installed on a machine that you use, there may be problems trying to install it again on a second machine. The situation you might run into is during WGA and updates. Your copy of MS Office may become flagged as "you may be a victim of software counterfeiting." At that point, you would not be able to obtain additional updates.

Yes, it is compatible. Open Office can open any MS Office file format. It can also save your documents or spreedsheets in MS Office format.

i only use linux os, so am a great fan of open source, but to be honest if i had to use ms office for work, then i'd stick to using a windows operating system to run it on. the reason for this is because it's for work, so needs to be 100% reliable and accurate everytime you use it, now good as open office is, or running ms office under wine, there are times you might run into compatibility problems(not so often now, but i think there are still a few around), and where work is concerned it's just not worth the risk of running into one of these problems when you can least afford it. just noticed the date of the original post.

Hi Mobilemania, Actually you have two options here. One is to use a program like wine(you can get it from www.winehq.org) which is fine. But remember one thing , dont expect Ms office to run as smootly as it does on windows, because it is designed for windows only. The second option is to use openoffice.org which functions the same as MS office and also uses the same format, literally there is no difference between the two. Thank you.