Opening files in Office for Mac

I used office for Mac (2008) for 3 years without many issues until last week when I tried to open a massive and complicated word document. Word froze and I could not get it going again although I could quit. Eventually did a complete restore of the Mac and back to normal - although I won't be trying to open that particular document again with Microsoft. I can open the whole thing in Pages but then the images are missing..... To do my editing work I am going to have to borrow a PC I think.

Office for Mac has also been freezing up regularly since I moved to Lion - apparently Microsoft have not managed to upgrade yet. So when I use Microsoft it is like stepping back 10 years - save manually every few minutes in case it crashes.

It is very frustrating, but I made up my mind to switch away from Office. I suppose if total Office compatibility is important it might be worthing sticking with Windows, but then these really complicated documents used to crash Windows too, I recall.