Holy crap
Recently, we published a book. A real one, based on a doctoral thesis, with a publisher, an academic book. And guess what? It was 100% written and laid out in OpenOffice/StarOffice. Some qualms, but in the end, everything was exactly as the publisher and we wanted it to be. And guess what? Only after Microsoft Office gave us just too many headaches. I think, it would have been possible with Microsoft Office as well, to do the same job; but definitively with more hassle.
This is my tip (and my trick): use a 22"-wide screen, 'Navigator' to the left of the text, and 'Styles' to the right (and know what to do with both, of course!!)! That's classes above the ribbon if you have > 400 pages to work on.
One gripe, a major one, though: citations need to be man-made. Office has this one great advantage: APA-style built in.
(As an aside: this shows the bad management in SUN: They seem to have no academicians, don't study the market; and in the end my RFE was pushed lightyears into the future. That's what I call "upcoming redundancies are self-inflicted".)
Paris, because she never had to fight with anything anyhow close to academic