One problem with OpenOffice is that somehow they dropped support for PowerPC Macs when upgrading to version 3.0, so it's only available for Intel Macs in US English. (Why is a mystery, because there are PowerPC versions in a few other languages, such as Swedish, as I recall.) NeoOffice does work, and is compatible with MacOS versions back to 10.3.9.
I have a copy of OfficeX around and find that's the best thing for any Word documents with embedded graphics.