Yes. It is important to match software, hardware, OS, all together from nearly the same era. New software on old machines isn't always best thing. But old software on new machines is just fantastically fast, though lacking features.
While speed of the CPU in MHz or GHz is always a factor, "it", today, is more and more about instruction sets. A lot of slowdows like this are probably because old CPU's need to use many many instructions to do what one instruction does in a modern CPU. You'll note that every new intel chip generation is coming with more instructions rather than ramping up clock rates. And for a while there they were ramping down the clock. Things like X87, IA32, MMX, SSE1,2,3,4,5, X86-64, AVX. Each offers more capability per clock tick than ever before.
It's great that compilers build software to fall back and that has lead to great compatibility and made for easy migrations. I remember playing some DOS games back in the late 1980's. And the stuff worked on every computer I've had since. Great compatibility, even if you need to use emulators like DOS BOX. Newer CPU's breeze through the workload of the emulator and emulatee. Guys & Gals, I'm playing games from the 1970's, today, on a state of the art machine. The same code, the same graphics. Totally fantastic! Atari games rock. And the magic happens not because today's CPU's are fast, they are rich in instructions. Oftentimes 1 instruction doing the work of 150 instructions in an ancient 8-bit machine.
Now, I would have no problem recommending either LibreOffice or ApacheOpenOffice. As a matter of fact, I rather liked the simplistic install that both offer. Furthermore I kind of got all flustered with the confusion and extraordinary amount of options and cloud things and collaboration features present in Office 2007 and later. Too many distractions. Too much bloat.
I always like to, more and more, stick with basics. This way I can concentrate on the task at hand. I almost want business to slow down and for once let the employees think through a problem rather than rush rush rush and spending extraordinary amounts of time looking good rather than doing good.
AOO & LO tend to fit into this style. Not because my old Pentium runs it slow, but because they take you back to basics. It has often been said that CS2 was the best version of Photoshop for it's time. And I find myself *still* using it!
And as a final comment I think the world would be a better place if all PC's came with AOO or LO, your choice.
And did you know that LO, supposedly, lets you use FireFox skins? So that means I can make it like once of those futuristic starship control panels or something.. I did this for the lady since she wanted a greenscreen look with Windows 3.1.. Something like her first job as recptionist at the airport or hotel. Yep got Win 3.1 going on i7 machine.