Have a friend who is going to buy xp pro for his laptop, and he asked me which would be better to run, Office XP or 2000? I have XP on my machine but have never messed with 2000, so I don't know what the differences are.

Is one better than the other? I've done some reading on each and have found more negative posts on XP, but nothing real serious...mostly about the activation.

Doesn't Office 2000 require activation as well? To be honest, aside from the smart tags and some other fancy looks I really can't tell the difference from the XP and Ofice 97 I used to use.

I guess the one thing I would be concerned with would be the compatability between the different versions. For example, I'm sure if I open a 97 word doc in xp it would convert and open, but what about the reverse. Can 97 read an xp or 2000 word doc, and if I edited that 97 doc in xp, would I be able to save it in the 97 format if needed?

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.