MS Office is overkill in terms of price, difficulty of use, and features for what most beginning Mac users need. Why not at least first try NeoOffice, which is basically Word from a few years ago, but free and doesn't support the monopoly? It's close enough to Word for windows to be familiar to platform shifters. And TextEdit and AppleWorks (which may already be on the computer) are probably good enough for most users.
The Applications You Really Need