Depending on what you want to use word and excel for (apart from the obvious), why not try textmaker. It has excel and word equivalents, is free, and works well. Keys work properly (page up/down/end/home) and it can read MS format docs. Not really a solution for getting MS stuff to work, but it should be an alternative. I use TextMaker for all my word processing tasks and haven't had a problem with interoperability or anything else for that matter.