Yeah, OO.o is waaay too slow. AbiWord is usably fast on the tablets.

I want to find just a .doc viewer...I don't even need to edit them most of the time, it would just be nice to be able to look at them. I would've sworn there was one for the ITs at one point, but I haven't come across it in a long time.

Also, there's always Google Docs.

For running other Windows stuff, there's always the possibility of rdesktop/VNC/etc to a machine running windows; that sidesteps much of the problem, if your connection is adequate.

if you kept an eye on maemo.org you'd have seen that evince was being paraded as a jewel on the home page
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/evince/

"Evince is a document viewer for multiple document formats. It currently supports pdf, postscript, djvu, cb, cbr, cbz, tiff and dvi."

Well, that still needs something to translate from .doc to one of those formats (most likely PDF).

If you just want a MS Office doc viewer, but you don't want to mess around with Debian (oh come on, you know you want to!), you can always try Bundyo's "Biggest Viewer of them All", it will convert all types of MS documents to PDFs.

Which is just OOo, which I thought was what some people were trying to get away from. There's no help for it; the only countermeasures against the bloated evil empire are available from the bloated not-evil empire.

Install Debian and be happy!

Well yes, of course, that's my song too. Easy Debian "just works" to bring you all the apps you want without much hassle. However, some people only want MS Office compatibility. If so, then the Big Viewer (yes, it uses OpenOffice's conversion library) might be for you.

links of interest for converting stuff to pdf

http://www.ros.co.nz/pdf/
http://www.fpdf.org/
http://www.tecnick.com/public/code/c...aiocp_dp=tcpdf
http://www.lowagie.com/iText/
http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.pdf.html