You will find that Knoppix (being a Debian based system) is much easier to edit/customise than Mandrake.

The newer versions of Oo are better at matching MS Word formats than earlier versions, although Excel still has some problems with a spreadsheet edited by Oo. MS Word & Excel will run under Wine, so will very simple Access databases but it chokes on Access with visual basic coding in it.
The latest Kword will also save in MSWord format but I haven't used it much so can't comment on how good the conversion is.

(edit) Now I see this is an old post, got here following a link. Hope this helps somebody.