Debian Packages: abiword.
The Gnome Office Suite offers AbiWord for word processing. AbiWord can import and export Micorsoft Word documents with quite a respectable degree of compatibility. But for starting new documents it is a very good choice. AbiWord is lightweight in terms of features when compared to Microsoft Word but it has the features that 90% of the users need!
AbiWord is also distinguished by the fact that it runs on very many platforms, including MS-Windows, BeOS (for both PPC and Intel hardware), Linux (Intel, PPC and Alpha), FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, SGI Irix, NetBSD, and QNX. Because of its light weight use of computer resources (compared to Microsoft Word) AbiWord is even popular on the MS-Windows platform.
The AbiWord user interface is very intuitive and in no time you will be producing the documents you want. If you are familiar with Microsoft Word then the AbiWord interface will be very familiar.