OFFICE '97/2003/2007 Upgrade Comparison?

bplipschitz writes: I have been tasked by the Boss to evaluate upgrading Office97 for our office. [BTW, I'm not the IT guy, just a known Open Source proponent, so I was tagged with this job]. Do we do the smart thing, and upgrade to 2003, knowing that it's got to be more stable [with patches] than 2007 will be [when released]? Or, do we wait 6-8 months and upgrade straight to 2007? Most users in our less than 50 seat shop only use Word and maybe Excel on mostly NT4.0 and some XP machines. My advice would be to get those users on OpenOffice, and upgrade only those that really really need true Microsft compatibility. One sticker [to me, at least] is backwards file compatiblity for all components of Office. How good is it? What pitfalls are there? Will the 'mass file coversion' schemes really work? The biggest unknown at this time is Access. We have a lot of Access reports that are run through our ODBC interface with our manufacturing database, and I don't know enough about Access [I'm a MySQL guy, myself] to know what we're getting into with either upgrade path. For folks that are also in this predicament, what are your thoughts? Switching everyone to OO is not an option.