I feel your pain. Until recently I thought that it was impossible to open the new .docx file format with Office 2003 or OpenOffice 2... That was, until today... I have found a link to Microsoft's Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats. Here's the link which has further instructions: Click Me!

What if you don't have MS Office? What to do... what to do... The free open source office alternative, OpenOffice.org, has a beta release of OpenOffice.org 3... this comes with no guarantees since it is just the beta version but if you really need to view those Office 2007 files try it by downloading here: Click Me!