Excel 97 and Word 2002

Most of our department upgraded to Office XP this past summer. However, one of the major programs that a few people use is only compatible with Excel 97, so they upgraded everything but Excel.

Yesterday I was asked to help one of these people. They tried to copy a table in Excel 97 to Word 2002, but it wouldn't paste properly, some of the columns were combined (but inconsistently). Anyway, she emailed me the Excel file, I saved in Excel 2002, then copied it into Word 2002 - perfect paste. So I emailed her back the Word doc.

Is this a known issue about Excel 97 and Word 2002? Is there a work-around so that i don't become the emailed-expert copier/paster?

Thanks. My first thought was maybe merged cells.

But, no, no hidden columns/rows. No merged cells, just a plain 5 column, 8 row table.

I assume it is the latest release. Being in a corporate environment, even if it were not the latest, we could not do anything about it.