Barbara -

Your Item 1:

Office 97 programs should be able to run on WinXP, although you may have to set them to "run as Win98" in the compatibility settings. This usually works okay with old "fully Windows compatible" programs, but often does not work with older "marginally compatible" programs.

There is no "established method," though, for transferring Office program components from one machine to another without the original installation disks. If you got your Office 97 stuff from an OEM manufacturer "already installed" you may find that the disks are "disguised" pretty well. Computer Manufacturers relabel things to make it look like they're the "whole world source for everything," so the "original disks" may have strange names on them. The ones you're looking for should have "Office" somewhere on the label, but may be just labelled "Restore" or "Recovery" or something similar.

If you bought Access97 and Excel97 separately, Microsoft policy has always been that they will not replace lost or damaged disks. If it "came on the machine," there is the possibility that an OEM builder who sold you the machine would provide replacement disks… but don't count on it. You could call them and pretend that you expect them to(?).

There is a procedure for using "Backup" in Win98 for transferring all your Windows/Office stuff from an existing hard drive to a new hard drive in the same machine that requires only the "first disk" from your Windows installation set (Win98SE once came on 11 or so floppies). It isn't specific about whether it takes the Office programs with it, but it implies that it does. The procedure is detailed in KB article 166172, for those who might need it. (The article is "inaccessible" to me now, but may come back.) The procedure is quite complex, and using it to move anything to your WinXP machine would disable WinXP.

Access97 is the oldest version that still qualifies for the "upgrade price" for Access 2003 ($109 list). I don't know what the current policy is, but many upgrades require that you have the old program (Access97) installed before the "upgrade disk" will install the new version, so you would still need the original disk to get it on the machine before you could use the "upgrade version" of the new program, and if you could get it on the machine you probably wouldn't want the upgrade(?). The "new program" full install list price for Access 2003 alone is $229.

Excel 2003, as a stand-alone is the same price, $229 for the full installation and $209 for the upgrade version.

If you really want both, you'd probably be better off getting the full Office 2003 suite. The "Office 2003 Professional Edition" is the only version available that includes Access, and lists for $499 for the full installation, or $329 for the upgrade. The stuff you got with "XP Home" probably does not qualify for the upgrade price on the Office 2003 Professional edition, but you can check it out at How to Buy Office 2003 Professional. I'm not able to find easily what's actually in the "Office Home Editon," if you got that with your new machine.

You may also want to look at What's in Office Editions.

The above are Microsoft's "list prices." You can probably find significantly better prices on the web, or occasionally even at retail stores.

When I looked a few weeks ago, while Office 2002 was still available, there were something like 11 different versions of Office available. Only about 3 included Access. If you look on the web, you may find older stuff available, but be very careful about which versions you look at to make sure that they include Access, if you need it. All versions of Office2003 that I've seen do include Excel (But remember that "Office Home" is not "Office").

John