I agree with Skrynesaver - I first used Ubuntu back in '07 with the good old Gnome. When I tried it again about 18 months ago, I didn't like Unity, so I started looking some place else, and that's how I landed with Mint, and IMHO it is the best distro to start with if you're coming from a Windows environment, especially because it has a couple of alternate graphical environments that you can try. Just saying
. Hope it helps!
PS: About using the Microsoft Suite, have you given LibreOffice a try? It doesn't lack anything that the Office suite has to offer.