Are there any word processors out there that are good and cheap?
This is always a hard question to answer. Depends greatly on what you mean by "cheap" and what sort of work you want to do with it. If you need to be able to do page layout work, often need to integrate photographs and the like into your documents effectively and so forth then Pages is really very good value, though, as Barbara says, it can take a bit of getting used to if you were brought up on MS Office.
If you just want to be able to write letters and basic documents then TextEdit, which comes free with every Mac, may be all you need. I actually suspect it could handle 90% of the things which most people need a WP for without batting an eyelid. It reminds me in some ways of one the programs that actually kicked off the Mac in the first place - MacWrite. You can do basic text formatting, create styles, and even insert images, but of course it is much less powerful than most of the "big" offerings.
The various "free" open source Office type offerings are good, but can be fiddly.
Even the Student edition of Microsoft Office for the Mac is pretty well priced these days, though dearer than iWork/ Pages, of course.
One that hasn't been mentioned in the thread so far, but is well worth a look, is NisusWriter. THis is a long standing favourite of linguists and others who have to work with multilingual text, but can hold its own in a regular office or home situation too. A universal binary version of it is now available. see
http://www.nisus.com/Express/
Cheers
Rod
