Read and write on external hard drive

I have bought my macbook air just yesterday.
I have an iOmega external hard drive with all files from my previous computer (an HP with Windows on it).
Now I would like to open and also edit and save the files on this external hard drive.
However, this does not work. I can open files, but cannot edit them. And I cannot save files to the external hard drive.
I have read a lot of things on the internet about Macfusion, but since I am new to Mac and not much of a computer-person, can someone give me like a step-by-step guide of how to handle this problem?
Your help is very much appreciated!

Drives used for Windows have NTFS partitions and MBR (master boot record) disk format.
Mac uses GUID disk format and HFS+ partitions.  Mac, without additional software, cannot write to NTFS partitions, but only read them.
You will need to reformat the harddrive to GUID/HFS+ which would delete all information on it.  Or buy some software that allows Mac to write to NTFS like NTFS-3G.

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