Openoffice has all the bells and whistles, I use it for my assignments (B. EE).
But I say start with Abiword. It's awesome, and more "amiga-like" than open-office - OO.org is so freakin' bloated even on a P-II 300/256MB under linux, it realy is a clone of MS office.
In case you don't know, Abiword is pretty much the "standard" GNU open source word processor for just about every architecture...
- Paul
