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THere are several word processors. Which one you use will depend largely upon how much you communicate with other folks that use M$ Word and related documents. Personally, I use StarOffice (a SUN product), or one of the office applications that come with KDE. There are a ton of editors for linux that deal with ASCII files. Unless you have a bunch of word documents that use macros, (word macros are evil and dangerous to your system security), or other esoteric functions of various M$ products, you should have no real problem converting from word to native document formats and vice-versa.

I don't know about tax programs. You might Google "linux" and "taxes". There is an excellent personal finance package called "GNUCash" that is extremely powerful and flexible.

The amount of shrink-wrapped isn't as small as some people believe, but you'll find that most programs for Linux are free or have free versions of them. I have no problem paying for software (unlike some linux zealots out there), but most of the time find it to be unnecessary or actually impossible.

One thing that I do reccommend is a product called "KRUD" which is a variant of the RedHat distribution. If you buy their subscription (i think it's $60), you get the entire distribution mailed to you every month with all security and software fixes for the thousands of programs it contains. Nore: I'm not affiliated with them in any way. I just am a satisfied customer.

(word macros are evil and dangerous to your system security)

I gotta take issue with this statement. Word macros are not evil and dangerous in and of themselves. The ability to embed a malicious macro onto an e-mail or an attachment that is read by an OFFICE product (Outlook, Outlook Express) and then take advantage of the (yawning) cracks in software written in one big hurry by those under the bootheel of oppression by Bill "Cracking the Whip" Gates to get the product into the marketplace is the problem.

I write and use macros all the time in Word and Excel. Gets the keystrokes for a specific entry or function down to a couple. I find them a real timesaver.