Office 2003 installation from iMac running leopard

Hey guys I still haven't bought the aspire one yet;
but when I do i'll probably be going with the xp version.
I run an iMac full time so I feel like I need a little foothold in the windows world.

The lack of optical drive worries me.

I've still got office 2003 and some version of works from when I bought an acer travelmate (circa 2005).

I was just wondering about the possibility (and ease) of sharing the optical drive on the mac to install office 2003 (it runs leopard 10.5.4).
Or somehow making a file that'll install it from a usb flash drive? (again using the mac to do this)

Since my university has gone office 2007 crazy (every file is sent out as .xlsx .docx .pptx) I kind of need office and I've already paid for office 2008!

Any help would be appreciated.

P.S wasn't sure of the correct forum so i've posted in both windows and mac os - sorry for inconvenience

 

i dont know for sure it will work for the office 2003 cd, but one of the things you can do to load a cd without a cd drive on the aspireOne is to make an image of the disc, put it in a usb drive and use a virtual disc drive (such as Daemon Tools) to load the image.

I havent tried making an image of a disc with a Mac so i dont know what software to use for that purpose

 

Thanks very much

Would I be right in saying that if i could rip it onto my hard drive as a .iso file
then move the file to a usb drive
then use daemon tools on AAO
that would be the best option

 

Why don't you install Mac OS X on your One?

 

I just don't want to.
I'm not the most computer literate, I get by but I can see it going very very wrong.

Besides I quite like to still have a little bit of windows (just for the choice) and xp isn't a bad os - i wouldn't touch vista with a barge pole

How are most people planning on installing windows programs without an optical drive?

 

Downloading, I guess.

 

I successfully did exactly this last night with Office 2007 and a Mac running OS X 10.4. Much easier than I expected.

All I did was copy everything off the Office DVD into a folder on the mac. I then copied this folder onto a USB drive.

When I put the USB drive in the AAO I just navigated to the installer file (which was called something along the lines of 'setup.exe') and ran the installer straight off the usb drive. No problems at all (obviously you need a valid product key).

I'm not certain this would work with Office 2003 but I'd definitely give it a go this way before you get bogged down in anything more complicated.