I thought you meant you were trying to
launch openoffice without a graphical environment, which would certainly
give an error - but if you are launching it from a terminal session on a
GUI desktop, then it should work.

On my system (which has the openoffice which came with the OS) when I
type "openoffice.org blah.doc" it does what one would expect - that's
why it sounds like something is wrong with your particular install.

If you downloaded a tarball from openoffice.org, then it would
definitely be better to remove it, and install a proper openoffice
package from the ubuntu repositories.