I prefer reading a pdf in evince than the .doc or .od? in OO.o. Evince is much lighter than OO.o. In order to convert your .od? files to .pdfs, you can export them from OO.o. Here's another way of doing it, and you don't need to run OO.o for this.

$ yum install unoconv -y
$ man unoconv
$ unoconv -d document -f pdf -v filename.doc
$ evince filename.pdf &

You might need to run unoconv twice initially, to get a listening instance up. Cheers!