I have also had occasional trouble scrolling from one page to another in docs from Israel when I use Open Office. However, sometimes the formatting changes, especially in tables. Remember, with Open Office you can still save your work as a Word doc or export it as a PDF. I don’t have any trouble with comment balloon text direction in Israeli docs when I edit them in Open Office. There are many reasons to like this free program, and this is one of them.
For example: if you open a comment box, the cursor appears on the righthand side, and your typing comes out like this: “:gnidrow siht tseggus I.” Documents created in a country that uses a right-to-left language, like Israel, will display text within comment balloons as right-to-left, even if the document language and the proofing language are both set to default to English.