Are microsoft word and macro-enabled templates compatible with Ubuntu?

This is something that i have struggled with for about 4 hours, trying to download things like playonlinux and wine in order to get a macro enabled template to run on ubuntu which i have recently converted to. The error is something as follows "there is no windows program configured to open this file," even though i have downloaded legally a version of microsoft office 2007 through wine.

Please help, this is more important than one would think.

Unfortunately you won't be able to navigate to the file and double click on it to get it to open in office. You'll have to open word first, then open the file using the dialog menus from within the program. That's the downside to using wine to run windows programs within linux.

Better integration can be obtained from OpenOffice or several of the other MS office compatable packages out there, but I can't say how well the macros created in MS office will work in OpenOffice. Try it and see.

You can use openoffice yourself (its free) and its available for linux and windows.

Have you gotten office to install? Have you been able to run and type a document in word?

To open the file from word:
Start MS word using Wine
Click on the big circle in the upper left of the program
Click Open
Use the menu to navigate to your file.
Click on your file
Click open button

Same as windows.

actually, i was able to open the macro-template with the top left button and "open," but i still can't open it or any other document just by opening it from a folder, also, sometimes an error message pops up about microsoft visual basics. I'm not sure. I thought that word was working enough that i could open documents that are just on my computer again, but it seems that i can only open the default (not the default template) document and others with the top left

That's what I'd been saying - you have to open the file from IN word. You can't get to it from the folders. That level of integration between linux and windows programs run in WINE just isn't there. You'll have to configure the default template using word, and access any and all documents from inside the program.

Configure the template? The same way you would on windows.

As far as being able to double click on a file in the folder, you might be able to write a shell script to act as a wrapper, but that's best left for another project, and might not be possible. Personally I'm not interested in trying it. You could probably ask on the forums at winehq.org

Looks like if you go to new rather than open that you can create a new document from an existing template, and there are options to find your custom template.

Dual booting is a choice, but I find more satisfaction in solving the puzzle in linux. Good luck.