OpenOffice is hurting desktop Linux
OpenOffice Writer and Calc have always been slow, unintuitive, and buggy, and an all-together unpleasant experience for new users of Ubuntu.
Thank god Gnome Office provides better alternatives:
AbiWord, a slick replacement for Writer that has great compatibility with Word documents as well as more obscure formats.
Gnumeric, an outstanding and easy-to-you substitute for Calc for spreadsheets.
On Ubuntu, install AbiWord and Gnumeric, cherry-picking Impress for presentations:
$ sudo apt-get install abiword gnumeric openoffice.org-impress
Enjoy.