God knows I spend enough time whinging about OOo but just because of this I need to say that the beta of version 1.1 is a huge improvement. Everything seems to work about twice as fast as v1.0, especially loading and saving. Lots of little niggly bugs have been fixed. The database interface is beginning to make real sense. You can now, for example, drag and drop a query from the database window into a writer document and get the results all neatly tabulated there.
This database window can be hooked up to almost anything: I have one that shows all the entries on this blog. I have another table with all my contacts in it; and within a year or so, there will be decent bibliography software too.
But there is still no regex support in this build.