have you tried opening Office 2007 / 2008 docs in OpenOffice? Broken and useless.. I wish it wasn't.. but its a sad fact..

they break as well... but it doesn't help me when clients and colleagues all use Office.

no.. it's useless.. I tried to use and the learning curve sucks and functionality can't compare to Office..

Hmm, I find the Text Editor in Mac OS X opens most Words files fine. I'm definitely not going back to MS Office!

Install Office 2007 and be done with it

its not that easy on a Linux OS.. got it running sort of ok using Wine.. running a virtual machine just for it now..