Upgrading from Office 2004 to Office 2011?

Running Word 2004 for Mac Version 11.2 and Excel 2004 Version 11.2.5 on Mac OS X 10.6.8 for a long time. Just bought Office: Mac 2011 Home and Student. Using the 27-character PIN online gave me the 25-character Product Key, and downloaded the (1.04 GB) MacOffice2011wSP2_English.dmg file.

I have been looking (online) to find out what (if anything) that I need to do before doing the upgrade.

I have done a Time Machine backup, and the backup drive is now offline for safe keeping, until the update process is all done and well tested for a day or two, as a precaution.

Should I just go ahead and boldly open the .dmg file? Or, are there any recommended steps to prepare for that? The Office 2004 came from my previous employer who provided the software for my use but I have no idea what the old product key is. I guess that I won't be needing that, since I have just purchased Office 2011 and hopefully won't ever need to go back to Office 2004.

(Currently running Mac OS X 10.6.8 on a 15" MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo (Mid-2009) 2.53 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB boot drive.)

Office 2004 and Office 2011 can co-exist together, however, the default will be setup for Office 2011 to open Word, Powerpoint, and Excel files. You can uninstall Office 2004 if you wish but do it before installing Office 2011. Another thing... Office 2004 will not run in Lion, Mountain Lion, or Mavericks since it is a PPC application.

Hey chscag, thanks! Just what I needed to know. +1 chscag