if your dual booting, you can mount your windows drives and read from them within linux. search this site as its asked and answered all the time. also we are working on a glossary for linux and related topics. And of course you can always read the man pages within your distro,
man man for info on the man pages, and you can check out the man pages here at LQ at
http://man.linuxquestions.org
check out
www.tldp.org for lots of howto's and documentation as well.
if your networked with windows you can use samba to share files from linux to windows that way.
www.samba.org
if you want to view your office files from within Linux as well, you can use StarOffice, OpenOffice and some others to view doc files and others.
Any other questions, just ask, everyone here is here to help out.

And welcome to the Linux world.