Whenever I install Ubuntu these days, opening OpenOffice looks like this. There's LP#53574, with no solution in sight. However, every time I was able to solve this by reinstalling openoffice:

$ dpkg -P openoffice.org-common openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-help-en-gb \
          openoffice.org-help-en-us openoffice.org-hyphenation-de \
          openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-us openoffice.org-l10n-common \
          openoffice.org-l10n-en-gb openoffice.org-l10n-en-za \
          openoffice.org-style-human openoffice.org-thesaurus-de \
          openoffice.org-thesaurus-de-ch openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-au \
          openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us language-support-writing-en \
          language-support-writing-de python-uno language-support-translations-en \
          language-support-en thunderbird-locale-en-gb

$ apt-get install openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-thesaurus-de 
                  openoffice.org-hyphenation-de openoffice.org-hyphenation-en-us \
                  openoffice.org-thesaurus-en-us language-support-writing-en \
                  language-support-writing-de thunderbird-locale-en-gb \
                  openoffice.org-style-human openoffice.org-writer openoffice.org-calc \
                  openoffice.org-impress

And no, it does NOT feel good applying Windoze techniques in a current Linux system :-\