compatibility appleworks/lion

AppleWorks will not work at all in Lion... It's too old. Some of your files will be openable by iWork apps, but some will not. Notably, there is nothing that can read an AppleWorks database in Lion as far as I know.

That was one of many reasons why I went back to Snow Leopard - thousands of legacy AppleWorks files, some of which were originally Claris Works files, all of them important for my work and many of them impossible to update to something compatible with Lion, such as a client database in which each card contains vital information about each client. I cannot afford to be without such documents and could not recreate them in some other application because it would cost hundreds of man-hours to do so.

For that reason alone I would suggest you treat Lion as a sandboxing thing, to experiment with, by installing it on a different computer or on a separate partition. I couldn't recommend it to anyone with serious work to do that requires access to AppleWorks (oh and BTW also to various other older applications that will not run on Lion).

Avoiding Lion will not work forever. Sooner or later, you will have to buy new hardware that is incapable of running anything older than Lion, or you'll need to buy a new printer, router, scanner, etc. that will not have drivers for an older system. If you've got stuff in old AppleWorks files that cannot be opened by an equivalent app, you need to start the process of transitioning now, before events occur that force you to do it before you're ready.