1) Currently I have Office Suite 2002 Profesional version. I'm thinking of replacing it with the 2003 version. Do I need to do anything special to save all my existing emails and files in Word and Excel, along with the format I've set up for my mail in Outlook and in my Word and Excel files, when I install the 2003 version? Are there any extra steps I have to go through or will all my existing mail, files, and format be automatically transferred after the installation?
Are you talking about a full version of Office 2003 or an upgrade version? If a full version, I feel quite sure that, if you try to install Office 2003 without first uninstalling Office 2002, the installation procedure will remove the older version of Office, but not without alerting you to that fact before proceeding.
Uninstalling Office 2002 will not delete your Excel and Word files, i.e. those files you've created and saved with .xls and .doc filename extensions. But, you would lose customized settings and macros. Macros, however, can be saved/exported and then imported into Office 2003.
For Outlook, you need to export all Outlook folders to a .pst file. After installing Office 2003, you can import that into Outlook.
2) From the little research I've done, Office Suite 2007 is not worth the trouble, as the improvements are not especially noticeable and ther new interfaces are quite different from the previous versions and will take time to get used to. Is this true? I'm relatively happy with the 2002 version and just want to have the additional features available in the 2003 version without having to start all over again.
Do you know of specific features in 2003 that 2002 does not have? If not, why get 2003? You might wait awhile longer and get 2007. After all, you'll probably be taking that step at some point, won't you?