Well, I have Microsoft Works on my PC and I cannot stand it, I was taught how to use Microsoft Word and now I sit down to use Works and it seems like all of the features that I liked to use are now gone, even simple ones like background images. So I am wondering if there is a Works substitute that is either cheap or free, because I do not have the money to by Office.

You could try this free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Word, abiword.
http://www.abisource.com/

I believe it saves in the same format as word, so you can take it to school and a little disk.

Check out this office suite too:
http://www.openoffice.org/

I have to say i never worked in Abiword. But i'm all for OpenOffice. Not only it is freeware, but i has a word processor similar to Word (and reads doc format), and more it has something like Excel, and a tool for presentations Impress (substitution for Power Point).
One more important thing is that there are tryings to make a standard for saving document files, and the formats that OpenOffice uses are supposed to be used for the world wide standards. So OpenOffice will become more popular, and more people might contribute in it to make it better and better.

Of course Writer (the Word substitution in OO <- OpenOffice) has some flaws, but still Word has some too
And another thing is that it's open source! At least for me it's a plus.

So concluding - my advice is OpenOffice (the adress is in the previous post).

I vote for OpenOffice... All I hear is praise so, I'll add to them I don;t actualy use it, but hey, it can't be that bad, right?