Yes. You can install office  2007 along with Office 2003 without uninstalling it.
But only one thing is that, you can have all necessary office components like
Excel, Word, Powerpoint, but you can have only one instance of Outlook. Either
you should have Office 2003 Outlook or of 2007. This is the only point in that,
rest is ok.

As your friend told getting learnt and working with 2007 is bit tuff than 2003.
But you will get into it soon.

I repeat you can install office 2007 without uninstalling office 2003. So you
can have both office 2003 as well as office 2007 installed on your computer.

Enjoy with both office versions.

If you want to cross check my points, please visit www.techtree.com and search
for offce 2007 where you can see the snapshots also where they had installed
2007 along with 2003.

I have a similar question.. I'm a little unclear with
your reply, so let me pose 2 scenarios.

Let's say I have 2 WBs, WB2003.xls was created with
Excel 2003, and WB2007.xls was created with Excel 2007.

Scenario 1: Can I bring up WB2003 and WB2007 at the same
time on the same computer, and have WB2003 appear as an
Excel 2003 WB while at the same time WB2007 appears as an
Excel 2007 WB?

Scenario 2: If Scenario 1 is not possible, can I bring up
WB2003 and have it appear as an Excel 2003 WB, then close it,
and then bring up WB2007 and have it appear as an Excel 2007 WB?

I'm not interested in working on the same file in two different
versions concurrently, but you pose an interesting hypothetical.

Aside from the issue of different versions, I doubt Win XP will allow
a second grab at a file -- won't it give a sharing violation? In an
enterprise environment, with a large network and many users it may be
possible, but for a single user I doubt it.

There is a format incompatibility to contend with also. 2007 uses a
different format for its files, and although it is backward compatible
-- i.e., 2007 can read all earlier version formats -- the reverse
isn't true. There is a compatibility setting I've heard that lets you
save in older formats.

Yes, I had read that about Outlook....one
version only. Fortunately, I don't use, and therefore don't install,
Outlook.

I haven't taken a look at the URL you offer, but shall do so.

I searched on the site you recommended, and the search for Office 2007
brought up more than 4000 results. I looked at the first few and saw
no screen shots or statements like this. Can you provide a more
specific URL?

i am using office  2000 and office 2007 both on my machine without any problem.I
don't think there should be any conflict.

This is good to hear.

I'll go ahead and install mine.

Scenario-1:

Yes. You can open both versions of excel  files in each version of excel. But
here you've to do one thing. Do not open both files by directly double clicking
on them. I doubt both will open in excel 2007. Rather you open both the excels
from your start menu and then from file menu open the respective versions of the
files in respective excels.
One thing I want to tell you here is that, excel 2007 is having an option to
save the file in different formats, even you can save in 97-2003 excel format.
But if you save as excel 2007 format then the file extension will be .xlsx. At
the last you will have 'x' added with their previous version etensions. this is
applicable for word and powerpoint too.

Scenaroi-2:

Yes. You can do this. Even more you can do. instead of opening excel 2003 from
start menu, you open excel 2007 and from file menu you can open both WB2003.xls
and WB2007.xlsx in excel 2007 inteslf. Otherwise you can double click the file,
and it will open in excel 2007 whether it is WB2003.xls or WB2007.xlsx.

Thank you for your explanations.. very helpful

Check out the below link, this is what i was trying to mention in my y'day's
mail.

www.techtree.com/.../article.jsp

In the second page you can see the screenshot of both 2003 and 2007 installed.

I do see both of them listed on the Programs menu. Will take your word
for it that 2003 runs normally with 2007 installed.