Compression Settings Options

[boilerblues]

I run the soundboard sometimes at church and have played around a little with some recording at home. I've learned some about compression and understand the basics of how it works, but I've not done a lot with it. One of the things that I do with my live recordings and with some audio editing on some video work I do is when I finish working on it I'll go into Sound Forge XP on my PC and I'll normalize and compress the audio to maximize the volume. Sound Forge XP has a nice option that just says "maximize volume" that takes care of all the compression settings. Now I'm trying to do the majority of my audio work and maybe my video work on my new Mac. Most programs don't have a preset option for maximizing the volume in doing mastering work. What kinds of settings do I want to use and what's the best way to do this? I'm doing my recording in Cubase SE. I figure I can just copy the presets from Sound Forge XP, but I'd like to understand better how to set up my compression to get a good sound.