put out a call for Microsofties. i had a buddy get me Office for $60 from the company store. Word alone is about $40. i bet there is one or a family member on your f-list.
my husband has been very successful saving AppleWorks docs as Word for others to use. you will have no trouble opening Word docs either. the only feature that is an issue is if you use the comments feature extensively, and so we finally bought a copy so that he could get comments on manuscripts.

i switched to Macs in 1999. unless you want to play the latest games, you'll never look back, although there are a lot of insufferable asshole Windows users in the industry to harass you.