Definitely give Libre office a chance it's a great free alternative office suite. When we have departments that aren't willing to fork out the money for MS Office we deploy Libre office to their systems often without anyone ever realizing they're not using Microsoft. These are non tech people too...
I personally really like ubuntuGnome! http://ubuntugnome.org Ubuntu as always is really easy to use and has wide ranging support. All without that terrible unity front end. Mind you the next major release of Ubuntu will be use Gnome so this distro is mostly pointless now.