You might consider Openoffice (on easy Debian). It seems to give the most robust version of ms documents including reproducing equations if needed. But it is slow to bring up. Once you get going the response is ok. One big problem for me is the portability of documents. If I make a document using Open Office (or any of the available document applications), save it as a file.doc, and then, say, email it to some who looks at it with Word the resulting document will often have messed up fonts, margins and so forth. My preference is Latex but most people I work with use Word.