Microsoft has released the Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 file formats. You can install this on your computer running Office 2000, XP, and 2003 and create/open/edit/save the new Office 2007 formats (aka EMCA Open XML formats).

If you are planning to phase in Office 2007 into your business, I would recommend that you install this onto your PC’s which are running pre-Office 2007 applications before or during the time you are going to start rolling in Office 2007. You can get more informaiton on the software pack from the Office Web Site or you can download it directly from Microsoft Downloads. You can deploy the software pack using Active Directory to push the software to PC’s or you can use SMS or a similar remote software deployment/management tool.