New Mac For Xmas, Word Processor Help..

For very basic use your mac comes with textedit which is located in the applications folder. For more advanced use you can purchase iWork which is Apple version of Office and includes a word processor, spreadsheet and powerpoint type software. Microsoft office is also available on mac.

You could also download Open Office which is free and see if you like that before you purchase any of the others

 

OpenOffice has become really powerful, and it's not that hard to use, especially once it went Aqua-native (>3.0). It's a great recommendation for anyone who doesn't need to do heavy collaboration with Microsoft Office users. Plus, download it, try it, what's the harm? If it's not for you, you just delete it.

 

http://www.bean-osx.com/

 

You could also try NeoOffice, which is also free and based on Open Office. I use NeoOffice and iWork, depending on what I need to do. I don't have Open Office, so can't comment there.

I use iWork when I need to something to look good. I'm a photographer, so visual presentation is important to me. The page layout in iWork does everything I need it to do when I'm working with posters, cards, short documents, letters, ads, etc etc.

If someone sends me a complex word document I will often use NeoOffice to work on it. iWork will work as well, but it just seems more appropriate to use a Word clone when working on a Word document. Its not rational, but there it is...

Congratulations. Welcome to the Mac World.