> Why in the world don't you switch to Libre Office?
As someone who uses LibreOffice to the point that it has displaced MS Office (which is no longer installed on any of my private devices, only work ones), i have to agree that it's the better option of the two.
However, one could make the argument for OpenOffice that it's pretty much stable/finished/dead at this point which also means that it's unlikely to have unexpected breaking changes, or even changes to the UI or anything else: which would be horrible for software like OpenSSL that needs to deal with security related issues and patches, but might be more passable for an office suite, given that the OpenDocument formats aren't changing that much. Of course, since OpenOffice does get some updates, the most severe problems would probably get addressed anyways: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Release...
Thus, it can be a viable package to just install and forget about, hence it's widespread in some universities that don't have awfully lot of resources to keep LibreOffice installs up to date (and if users learn it, then they'll probably be able to keep those skills relevant for the rest of its lifetime). Of course, one can also make an argument that you can just run an old version of LibreOffice, since the changes aren't that severe.