OpenOffice is a nice product. It provides a working alternative to MS Office, is for free, and is constantly improving (unfortunately, it needed lots of improving and it still needs some improving). Best of all, it can read those nasty MS Office files… until Microsoft changed the format again.
Yes, my current ubuntu installs are a bit behind the times. No biggie, but when someone sends you an XLSX file (Excel 2007) and your OpenOffice 3.1 chokes on it… meuh. I googled and googled… OpenOffice v3.0 and above should be able to open XLSX files. Well guess what Sherlock, it no worky work.
So after a short while of fruitless googling for solutions to my problem, I decided to google instead for how to update your OpenOffice to the latest greatest. See here. Caveat: it uninstalls some packages, including ASpell — you’ll probably want that back.
And that fixed the issue. Hoorah for OpenOffice, the latest version does what was promised a few versions ago ;-)