Is office for the mac the only way I can open and save as word documents?
There are various solutions for dealing with Word documents on the Mac:


Quick Look, built into all versions of OS&nbsp;X since Leopard, can preview Word documents. It doesn’t always get the formatting right, but it’s good for a quick inspection.
Pages, part of the iWork suite, can open (in .doc and .docx) and save (in .doc) Word documents. This isn’t perfect either. One useful feature is that it shows you a list of warnings when you open a document, highlighting Word features used in the document that aren’t supported in Pages. Pages costs $19.99 in the Mac App Store.
NeoOffice is an open-source port of OpenOffice to the Mac, which can open and save to a wide variety of formats, including Word documents. NeoOffice can be downloaded for free from their website.


There are a handful of other word processors on the Mac that can handle Microsoft&nbsp;Word documents (Nisus Writer Pro and Write both spring to mind), but I don’t have enough experience with any of them to say how good they are at handling Word’s formatting.

If you’re using advanced features of Word, or very complicated formatting, then your best experience will be using the native Microsoft apps. But for simple formatting, any of the apps I just mentioned will probably be sufficient. It really depends on what sort of documents you’re likely to be dealing with.