Mac OS X TextEdit Reads and Writes Microsoft Word Formats

Wow. Who knew the little TextEdit application supports .doc, .docx and PDF formats?

This actually worked for me today:

1. I imported some Word 97/5.0 business documents
2. updated and saved them
3. and I exported them as PDF.

So you can do light documentation, invoicing, etc. without installing additional software.

For multi-column and chart formatting, just use the the Format => Table… menu option, similar to old-school HTML layout. You can set the table cell borders to 0 pixels to make them disappear.

osxdaily.com: Opening DOCX Files on a Mac, Without Microsoft Office