One of the things that happened when we moved was the discovery that there was no way my antique Macintosh could be made to work in our new apartment. Which means that I now have an iMac with many bells and whistles. That's good -- except when it gets in the way of getting my work done.

I've always written everything in MacWrite Pro and then used a utility program to translate the end result into a format my publishers would be satisfied with. I loved MacWrite Pro; I had it on automatic. Now, to my dismay, I'm stuck with writing in Word, and in spite of a stack of books alleged to explain how that's done, I am constantly at a loss. I don't know how to do headers or footers, I don't know how to make the cursed program paginate, I don't know how to italicize or underline ... I'm pretty helpless. And when I turn to the books that are supposed to be so encyclopedic, they don't tell me one useful thing.

This is seriously interfering with getting my new novel written, which makes it nontrivial. I can't afford the time I'm losing.

Any suggestions?