I feel your pain and sadly, the only way I could find around this issue was to use a virtual machine running Windows 7 with Office 2010. I have used Libreoffic

I feel your pain and sadly, the only way I could find around this issue was to use a virtual machine running Windows 7 with Office 2010. I have used Libreoffice's Writer with some degree of success. My dissertation was written in it and some of its specific features are actually more advanced than the Word counterparts, mainly: automatically numbering pictures and tables, auto-TOCs and formatting styles. Word does all that but Writer is way more flexible in this regard. What I couldn't adapt to, though, was the gap between MS Excel and Libreoffice's Calc. The difference in functionality and usability is huge :-( Just try to properly format a bunch of cells in Calc and you'll realize how cumbersome and painful it is. The virtual machine approach works nicely but then you have another box to mantain. Since mine is just for Office I leave it Internet-less and that makes for another set of adaptations (ex.: how to put and remove content to the VM, need to use CIFS/Samba for that, etc). o/