Considering switching from a windows laptop to a MacBook

Yes.

Apple's Pages can access Word files directly.

Alternatively you can always download Microsoft Word for Mac to the Mac to access your files.

If you have an active subscription to Microsoft's Office 365, you can log in to your account and access it in the Mac App

There is also LibreOffice . It's free – though the developers will accept donations.

LibreOffice has versions that run on Windows, Macs, and Linux, so you could download the Windows version and play with it on your current Windows PC to get an idea of whether it would work for you on a Mac.

M-W5 wrote:

We are considering moving from windows to a MacBook. Will we be able to use and access files already created in word to the MacBook, that are currently stored on an external hard drive?

If you want to edit those Word files, you might need to copy them to another drive.

Macs can read volumes formatted with the Windows filesystem NTFS, but cannot write to them without the aid of third-party NTFS drivers. Many people prefer to format drives in a native Mac format (APFS or HFS+) – or to use FAT32 and exFAT for drives that will be moved back and forth between a Mac and a PC.

This is separate from the question of which application (Word, Pages, LibreOffice, etc.) to use to edit the files.

Note that the current one-time-purchase version of Office/365 is Office Home and Student 2021. I believe that there is an Office Home and Student 2024 in the works, although I do not know exactly when Microsoft will release it. If you are interested in the one-time-purchase version, you may want to wait and see if the 2024 version comes out soon.

What specific reason do you have for switching to a completely different platform?