Running Windows programs under Linux

I have had success running various Windows applications (mostly games) under Linux using the software called 'Wine'.
To install Wine, run the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wine1.5

Then to run a Windows application I recommend doing so from a terminal window as any errors can be seen and 'googled' for a fix.
So for example to run Microsoft Word, change to the directory containing the word.exe and run the command:
wine word.exe

If any errors are displayed then you need to google them and apply the recommended fix.

So, as you can see to run a Windows program just requires prefixing it with 'wine' first.