I'd suggest ditching MS Office and using Open Office 1.1 (beta2), which is by far the best OoO version I've ever used (seriously enough I'm considering ditching Gimp and Photoshop to my other machines and using this one instead...) and now it's not difficult for anyone to find the program advantages over MSOffice...
If I had to use a MS-Office release, that would surely be MS-Office 95 (yep, dont' laugh please...) cause it's the only MS suite (StarOffice 5.2 too) which fully supports tose old, wonderful non-unicode fonts.