How come my AppleWorks6 program crashes and what am I supposed to do about it?

Try downloading the AppleWorks 6.2.9 for Mac OS X. update. or AppleWorks 6.2.2 for Windows.

What version of OS X are you using? I believe AppleWorks is a PPC binary. It shouldn’t work on any version of OS X past 10.6.8. 10.7 killed support of Rossetta (the framework that allowed PPC code to run on Intel).

And you might want to give Pages a try. It is only 15 bucks.

Here’s a report. Before I saw these two Jelly-answers, I paid (!) Apple Support for an hour and a half (!) of chat time with one of their minions – no, two, because one of them disappeared and I had to start all over with a second one.
I did try to do what you suggested, @Smitha, but it wouldn’t load. The chat guy then tried to walk me through it but it wouldn’t load.
Then the chat guy figured out that since AppleWorks was defunct, it wouldn’t load or upgrade onto my computer or anywhere else either.
This took one hour of his time. Nice. I will not be paying this bill.
Then this dude suggested Pages but was unable to offer it to me himself and asked me to buy it elsewhere. If I’m told it’s more than 15 bucks, thank you @johnpowell, I’ll go kill someone. Meanwhile I had to make a document and did so on horrible, horrible Microsoft Word, the least-intuitive-ever tool ever invented. Whereas Appleworks6 made complete sense.
I thought you would all enjoy this story, you’re welcome. xoxoxox