I've had Office 97 since 1997 and have been happy with it, however, since many documents I receive have been done on newer versions of Office, I decided to buy Microsoft Office Home & Student.  My other reason is that I have recently PURCHASED a LAPTOP that doesn't have a word processing program so I figured I would buy the newer version because the salesman assured me that I could legally RUN the NEW version on both of my computers, but Office 97 cannot be run legally on both computers.  Since I have thousands of documents done with Office 97 I am wondering how well these documents will open on the newer version?  The salesman at Staples said that the two programs would run along side each other and that I didn't have to DELETE Office 97 from my system.  Is this true?  And will they play nice together?  I also have more than a few documents on floppies that were made with Word Perfect in 1995.  Will I have a problem opening these in the newer version of Office?  And yes, I still have 2 floppy drives on my computer that I had built about 4 years ago.  I never have much luck putting stuff on re-writeable cds and then getting them to open again and do changes.  I have an external hard drive instead.  Thanks for your time.Word 97 documents will open fine with Word 2007.  You can then decide whether to save it in Word 97-2003 format, i.e., .doc, or the newer Word 2007 format, i.e., .docx.   If you want, you can set Word 2007 to use the Word 97-2003 format by default.

Installing two versions of Office on the same computer can be done but it's not recommended.  If you want to install both, do a careful read of this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/218861