Hello all, Thanks for your help with crossover office trial yesterday. It worked. Instead of CTrl Alt F3 I right clicked the desktop (as suggested) and chose terminal. I assume that Ctrl Alt F3 takes you right out of X windows and I also assume that SU means Super user and is the same as Logon / Root Excel now runs sweetly in gnome. I have to say Excel opens my pricebooks from suppliers far, far better than open office (which crashes or runs very slow on about half of the pricebooks) They are just too big or have too many bookmarks. Since the suppliers collectively send me a dozen or so spreadsheets a week, this is quite a big issue. Quatro Pro in Windows environment does a much better job of opening suppliers' pricebooks than open office or any of the Linux ones I have loaded on gnome or KDE. -- Cheers, Wayne D. Garton