“If you’re considering switching to a Mac, you’re probably wondering if you’ll need to buy a lot of new software,” Al Fasoldt writes for The Syracuse Post-Standard. “Maybe not. Apple’s OS X (pronounced “oh ess ten”) computers might not need extra software to do the tasks you want.”

“You don’t need any extra software if all you want to do is open Word documents. All OS X computers come with a competent word processor called Text Edit, and it knows how to deal with Microsoft Word documents. It will open them so you can read them, and it will save documents in Microsoft Word format, too,” Fasoldt writes. “What about e-mail? Apple’s OS X comes with a program called, appropriately, Mail. It’s excellent. It has a built-in spam filter and a built-in spelling checker. Apple’s Mail software can even group your mail by message topics, or threads. It lets you find replies you wrote to any message with a single click.”

Full article with more examples here.

More information about smoothly adding a Mac OS X machine to your computing arsenal here.