I use Bean (for Mac, no longer supported) for reading documents. Open Office and Libre Office also work.

Honestly, I use Word for writing formal documents on the rare occasion when it happens, such as letters to the government. But not for resumes. The formatting is just too frustrating. I've been using HTML and markdown for that. www.rocketships.ca, for example. I never send .docs to anyone - .pdfs or raw text only.

I can't remember the last time I had to open anything in Word format. I did have a copy of OpenOffice installed on my last laptop - I'm sure eventually I'll get around to installing it on my current one. But I only trust OO to read Word files, I would never send someone a .docx generated by OO.

I do say that. If I'm dealing with somebody's rude enough to force me, I open it in vim and pull what I'm looking for from the XML.