When I did the 2007 install, I got a message that said something like "You
can only have one version of Outlook" at which time, it installed Outlook
2007. I do not use Outlook and had not fully activated outlook 2003, which
may be why I had no trouble. If you have a lot of mail and calendar activity
in Outlook 2003, the installer might not like it much.
It is not necessary to remove 2003 before installing 2007 (with the possible
exception of the outlook issue, which I suspect is an artifact of how you are
using Outlook 2003), however, it does make some system-wide changes.
When I did the install, 2007 re-did all my icons so that every 2003 office
file I opened launched 2007, which was....interesting. I have 2007 and 2003
on separate drives, and it is possible to re-install 2003 without cleaning
out 2007 in that environment. This returns the 2003 icons and you can run
both 2003 and 2007 alternately.
Why would I want to run both 2003 and 2007? Well, I teach computer
science, and want to tell my students about the future, however, for the
moment, I still have to teach 2003.
In general, the 2007 interface appears excellent and I have found no
problems (yet).
