Well, I guess I'm a bit of an odd duck in all this. I've always used and preferred Word (and the rest of the suite) to Appleworks. Never liked AW, always found it didn't do what I wanted it to or could get Word or Excel to do easily. Sure - familiarity may have played a big part, but I just didn't much like it. My kids use it - they've used it in school - and they also use Word.
My previous school district in North Andover, MA made the completely idiotic move to PCs in their central office about 9 years ago, when the equally idiotic head of technology (who was the original dinosaur - really did NOT know his cookies) decided that they had to do this because the state required that they submit reports etc. in MS Word. Apparently it never occurred to this dolt that MS made Office for Macs too. I later told some of the staff that there had been no need to switch platforms; that Office was available for Macs and they had no idea - and several of them lamented how much they missed their Macs and what a pain in the neck their PCs were. The central office was by this time paying over $10,000 per year for outside maintenance of these PCs, something they had never had to do with their Macs.
As if that idiotic decision wasn't enough, they were also on the verge of switching to PCs district-wide when they built and equipped the new high school, which opened 3 years ago. In this case, the lame duck head of technology was about to retire, and though he didn't agree with the decision (by this time he'd realized the cost of maintenance apparently) nobody would listen to him; he wasn't capable of marshaling the evidence effectively and was generally treated as a joke. This decision-making was taking place about 5 years ago. I'd been protesting to our superintendent - I knew full well that we lacked the technology staff to support Windows and I knew that it wasn't going to be a cheap or easy solution. I gave him a stack of stuff to read about TOC etc. Still wasn't making much headway, although he was becoming quite intrigued by what he'd read about OS X. Then two things happened; our business manager got involved and asked about a transition plan - HOW were they going to actually move all those files and transfer all that data? Nobody had a clue. And then the local Apple education rep asked for a last opportunity to meet with the superintendent and others, and to his credit, he wowed them, pure and simple. Took them to see another brand new, mostly Mac HS in Massachusetts, showed them the networking and integration with the PCs on the network and generally resolved most of their questions. Net result was that the decision to dump the Macs was reversed and the new HS now has a lots of iMacs, G4s, G5s and every teacher in the district has an iBook or a Powerbook.
Of course, shortly after, they got a new superintendent who was the world's most arrogant and horrible man and he did everything he could to slam Macs. He knew NOTHING about computers and saw no need for technology to be truly integrated into education, but that didn't stop him. Luckily he got turfed out for having an affair with a secretary and various other nefarious deeds before he was able to do much damage to the hardware infrastructure. (He did however, completely decimate the support infrastructure - they are now hobbling along with about 1.5 people to support some 2000 computers, and no money to hire anyone else)
All of the teachers' Macs are now loaded with MS Office; and I believe some of those in the HS as well. The problem of course is the cost of licensing; they already had the seat licenses for Appleworks and MS ain't so cheap. They've concentrated on the areas where compatibility with PCs is more likely to be an issue and where files go back and forth many times.
