For those of you that *REALLY* need MS Office and Open Office is not enough, then install wine just run this two commands on a terminal:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
sh winetricks msxml3 dotnet20 gdiplus riched20 riched30\
              vcrun2005sp1 allfonts  wsh56js

And then install using your installation CD.

UPDATE: If you are using a non-english locale the second command has to be:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8" sh winetricks msxml3 dotnet20 gdiplus riched20\
              riched30 vcrun2005sp1 allfonts  wsh56js

UPDATE 2: For Ubuntu 10.10 try just this:

winetricks msxml3

Aftwerwards add an override for riched20 and usp10 to “Native then Builtin” using winecfg.