Some people that use Office really push it hard, they've got macros, indexes, all sorts of junk that's edge-case. The converters do not always pick up on this stuff, or if they do they subtly mangle the formatting enough it's all wrong.

For example, if you have an index then a tiny kerning shift can bump an item to a new page and screw up your numbering.

It really depends on the types of documents you're dealing with. Some are hell, others are a no-brainer.

We would love to have your bug reports: http://bugs.documentfoundation.org/

It's good to search for duplicates first or see this filterable list of the most popular dupes: https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/duplicates.cgi

I remember working in an office environment with some very large powerpoint files (50-100 slides with large images), and the rule of thumb was that 'openoffice is free, but MS can handle the big stuff'. Don't know if that's still true, haven't tried OO in a while.

OpenOffice is basically dead in terms of development nowadays. If you're looking for a desktop office suite on Linux, LibreOffice (a fork of OpenOffice) is still actively maintained.

I tried Libreoffice writer briefly recently. I imported some large pictures onto a single page and it became unusably slow. It seemed to be redoing an expensive computation (likely the pictures) with every character I typed. So yes, clearly not as optimised as Word. I had to reluctantly ask to borrow my wife's computer with MS Office for this particular task.