Thanks yes I did try OpenOffice first, I've also got it on an old netbook and it's not bad - definitely OK for occasional use. But I'm a part-time translator and there are a bunch of features that are really important to me, which I've become very used to in Word. All the subtle things Word does with drag and drop, spacing, capitalisation, fonts, search and replace, paste formatting, multi-lingual auto-correct etc. Especially since all clients texts arrive in docx and have to go back in docx (or doc).
So, as I found today, if I export a document from Pages (may be the same in OpenOffice) to .doc to then open it on my old computer in Word and make final adjustments and convert it to docx, I lose superscript ordinals. That's a deal-breaker in itself, which lost me a good half hour. But there were countless other things. I turned auto-capitalisation on in Pages but it capitalised after a.m. and i.e. so I had to turn it off.
Earlier today, when I tried to centre a title in OpenOffice it centred the whole text, which is what got me to hit the App Store for Pages in the first place (it was the same in Pages) - it was like going back to 1995. I really should have just got Office straightaway with the new iMac (I actually need Excel too) - I was just peeved at having to get another copy just before the new version came out, as my installation limit has been exceeded, so started looking at alternatives to tide me over. I've got my old iMac still sitting next to the new one while I transfer everything, but I love the new one so much already, it really grates when I have to start clacking away at the old keyboard.