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KOffice 1.5 Released
ingwa writes to tell us that the KOffice team has released version 1.5 which offers, among other things, default OpenDocument file format, new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. From the announcement: "KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument."
This is off-topic but may be a help to you. I don't know what academic area your ph.d students are in, but in the sciences, math, and economics, the use of LaTeX is very common. (I'm guessing if you were in one of those areas you would already know about it.) LaTeX performs wonderfully with arbitrarily huge documents --- I published a 900-page book using it. On the other hand, if you need to do a lot of fine-grained page-by-page formatting, it probably isn't for you. There are LaTeX solutions for the Mac, but I haven't used them.
To be honest I find Word to be a mess. I know some people love it but I find it unusable.
Keep in mind that ODF is a spec not a law. By supporting ODF you are not required to support all features the format is capable of. Simplistic example: I create a text reader for blind people, I can probably ignore 80% of the ODF spec and be compliant in reading (and writing) it for my needs. I'm sure Open Office will support everything including the kitchen sink, while Koffice will support mostly a subset of that - so I would expect some features may be missing. ODF is also pretty flexible so it can support stuff we haven't even thought of yet.
I've moved away from Open Office because of the bloat, so if Koffice skips some of the more obscure parts of the format that Open Office supports, that's okay by me.