Microsoft Office 2007, another member of the crappy Microsoft product family, has graced us with the .docx format. It's the "open xml format" which no one else can seem to use. There's an interesting article here, http://holloway.co.nz/can-other-vendors-implement-ooxml.html, about the difficulty for other vendors to implement Microsoft's "open" standard. I'm no expert at examining document standards, but the article is convincing and we all know Microsoft's history. 

At any rate, Novell is doing an excellent job of developing the first OpenOffice.org support for .docx: http://download.novell.com/SummaryFree.jsp?buildid=ESrjfdE4U58%7E (I wasn't able to get the plug-in working in my Windows machine at work. Anyone who has... easily... feel free to comment)

I followed the guide at a blog I Googled and found called Sigmundvoid. Link here: http://www.sigmundvoid.com/?p=81. Everything worked just peachy on my Kubuntu machine following that article.