Since you are accustomed to MS Word you probably should take a look at NeoOffice (available from the App Store) or its open source (donation ware) siblings Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. All spring from the same open source kernel and are a credible replacement, for the MS Office Suite but each has a slightly different look and feel. They are compatible with doc and docx document formats as well as xls, ppt and their x variants. I am partial to OpenOffice probably because I have used it for several years now but I believe it has the best integration into OS X of the three.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein