I'm not a heavy Appleworks user(actually, I'm not sure if I've ever used it, even though I have a copy of it), but then I'm also not wild about Office '01.
I keep Office on my OS 9 systems for compatibility reasons, but at the same time, it's increasingly limited since XML compatibility is somewhat expected now on modern documents. I don't THINK there's a XML plug-in for Office '01(you can get them for Office '04 and X, which are OS X only) but I'd be happy to be proven wrong on that. I haven't experimented with how much those let you use macros and other functions in Excel and Powerpoint also.
Of all the common word processors available, I like Word Perfect 3.5e. Of course, it also has compatibility issues if you save in the default formats, but you can save to the universal .rtf(rich text format) which works in any modern word processor. I THINK it will also handle .doc files, just not .docx.
As something of a "gateway", be sure you have a copy of Stuffit Expander installed. Many Macs came with it pre-installed in the OS 9 days, but if not you'll need it as many programs you download will be in .sit format.
Also, whether or not you have a CD burner, I STRONGLY suggest installing a copy of Toast. There again, when you download and unstuff many programs you'll find a .toast image rather than the .smi file that OS 9 can handle natively.
Remember that OS 9 has a seamless and effectively invisible 68K emulator-in fact I've been told that the OS 9 codebase was such a mess that certain parts of the OS actually relied on this emulator for the OS to function properly. What this means-in practical terms-is that any Macintosh program written for anything from system .95 up to 8.6 will run without missing a beat on OS 9. In fact, I've noted that-using Classic Mode-a G5 Quad that shipped in 2006 could run ALMOST any Macintosh program ever written(the only ones that wouldn't work were those that required an ADB HASP to work). There are a lot of really great programs out there that may take some digging, but work great once you find them.
As an example, a few years back our then scientific instrument specialist at work(I hold that position now) dug up quite a powerful program for offline processing of FT-IR data. It was mainly meant to work with data on which the fourier transform had already been performed, but COULD do the FT if you fed it an interferogram. He asked me about running it, as it was written for and only "guaranteed" to work on a Mac II running System 6. I ran it on my 512Ke, on which it was quite slow and cramped(too little screen space) but ultimately got it set up in my office on a G3 beige that had been upgraded with a 1ghz G4 and a lot of other over-the-top upgrades. It ran like a greased pig on that computer. The only "hiccup" is that the FT-IRs we have(Mattson, running their now very dated WinFirst software and a newish Perkin Elmer ATR-FTIR running Spectrum, along with a Nicolet I'm trying to get going and running Omnic) can output the now defacto standard .csv. This is a comma separated value ASCII file, and is a defacto spreadsheet format(Excel and mos other spreadsheet programs will open it as such). The ancient program wants a now mostly obsolete tab separated vae, but fortunately it was easy enough to bring a .csv into Excel and save it as a .tsv...
