If you want the latest and greatest OpenOffice (currently 2.1.0.6) on your Ubuntu system, the instructions are here. They worked perfectly for me. The key is not to panic when the system tells you that ubuntu-desktop will be removed; it’s a meta package, you won’t lose your desktop.
Basically you download and extract the OO tarball, find the folder of RPMs, use alien to convert them to deb packages and install using dpkg. It’s pretty straightforward and the latest OO looks great.
