I am new to mac and have an external hard drive question

Hello
I am new to mac. I used a PC before and stored all of my files (documents, photo's and music) on an external hard drive. The new mac is communicating with my external and is allowing me to open word/excel documents into pages/numbers. However when I go to save the document to my external the mac tells me "your document could not be saved. you can duplicate the document or discard your changes to close it."
Is this happing because the external is formatted to PC and not mac? Will I need to get a mac external hard drive if I wish to continue to save my documents like this? or will I need to get Miscrosoft office for mac for me to continue to use my existing external? or will i need to duplicate everything to save?
Please help.
Thanks
Janice

Is this happing because the external is formatted to PC and not mac?
Yes that is correct.
Will I need to get a mac external hard drive if I wish to continue to save my documents like this?
If you no longer use a PC you could format this drive for the Mac. However be aware that formatting a drive will erase all the data on it. So you would need someplace to copy the data off this drive to while you did the re-format and then you could copy the data back.
You could get another drive, format it for the Mac and copy the data to it. Then re-format the original drive and use it as a backup drive. Always good to have backups.
Post back with the drive type and size of the current drive, if you are doing backups now and how and if you still need to access this drive from a PC.
regards

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I am new to mac and have an external hard drive question

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