Before upgrading to 2007 I think the previous version we had was Office 95.The last version of Office we had was 2007 (Student) for the wife mostly which she continued to use up until last year when she no longer needed it for work. I've been using first OpenOffice then LibreOffice since 2010.Wordperfect was still the best in my opinion. Word is still horrible and placing art within a document, WP was great at it.I pretty much only use LibreOffice Writer and even that's rare nowadays. There's a bunch of open source office suites out there including WordPerfect which was my original office suite and which I thought was long dead.Yep... I was an Open Office user for prolly close to 10 years, exactly as you say, it started taking forever to load. I never found a good explanation as to why that happened. The next LinuxMint I installed came with Libre Office instead. I use it on the Linux side and Windows both for several years now.Open Office (Oracle) was given to Apache in 2011 then combined it with Lotus Symphony and has lost market share ever since. In 2016 Apache started looking at discontinuing Open Office, not sure where they are with it now.
Oh and it looks like OpenOffice is still around.
I used WordPerfect and dBase for spreadsheets oh so long ago.
I believe the last version we had was Office 2000.