TextEdit is one of the most overlooked gems of Mac OS X. It started out life as a lowly text reader, but has, over time, become a small but decent word processor.
(TextEdit is located in your Applications folder, by the way)
One of TextEdit's best tricks is that it can open Microsoft Word files. This is very handy if someone sends you a Word file and you don't have Microsoft Office. Simply click on the .doc or .docx file and it will open in TextEdit. (Leopard is required to open .docx files.)
TextEdit can't match Word feature for feature, and what you see in TextEdit may not be exactly how the file would look in Word, but it will be close enough to read and print.
You can also create documents in TextEdit and save them (Using Save As...) in .doc and .docx (with Leopard) format.
NOTE: If you open a .doc or .docx file in TextEdit, make changes, and try to save it back as a .doc or .docx file, the file may loose some of its formatting. TextEdit will warn you of this and suggest that you save it with a different name.
UPDATE: check out buzzword as another way to open Word files without using Word.
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