If you downloaded the tarball and used setup to install, then you should have the following directory within your home directory: OpenOffice.org1.1/

You can then Open OO, by going to a shell and cd OpenOffice.org1.1/

Then ./soffice

To be able to open OO from the task bar do the following:

Right click on the current icon and remove it.

Right click again on the taskbar and choose: Add/Special Button/Non-KDE Application

Then navigate into your home directory and then into OpenOffice.org1.1/

You will then want to select either soffice or navigate further into program and choose swriter or scalc or whatever.

After you select soffice or swriter, the next box that pops up should have place to enter "Optional command line arguments" Click on the Icon beside it to choose an appropriate icon for OO. You may need to navigate through some of the submenus there to get to an icon that you like.