We've just got new computer but haven't got Word and Excel on it. GF used these regularly on old computer and is considering paying silly money for MS Office. Basically what I want to know is will OpenOffice open documents created with Word and Excel, and will documents created with OpenOffice be openable (is that a word?) with Word/Excel?

Cheers

Yes, and yes, if they've been saved as a .doc (OOo defaults to saving as its own proprietary format -- figure that one out).