question about MS Office/Tiger

I may be in the wrong spot, new to this. I have purchased a Mac -mini in an attempt to get my feet wet with a Mac.
I have to use a legal pleading template in my work [court reporting] which I now do with a PC and Office. The MS Office software I have [98] has this template available and surprise, it is a good one.
If I decide to use my new Mac to do some of my work, what version of Office would I need to use to accomplish this? I can't find the answer on the MS Office website. Also does anyone know what the difference is between the student/teacher version and the standard other than the obvious? Would Tiger run Office 98 for Mac since that is the version my template is located in and with what I do, I don't need to load Power Point, Excel and all the other stuff. I have a new version of Office, 2008 on one of my laptops and my template is not on it [big downer] which is why I am asking about 98. The template on the MS website is awful and if you insert page numbers, you lose the line numbers.

Hi and welcome! The template should open just fine in MS Office 2004. You have the Office Test Drive installed in your Applications folder, right? It only gives you thirty days of demo mode before you have to buy it, but it should answer your question. Office 98 is a Classic application and will not run on your Intel chipped Mac.

The only difference between student versions and the full version is price

If you haven't got the money to upgrade to Office 2004 (as Sherman Homan said, you will need this version to run on an intel mini) then give NeoOffice a try, its free, open source and will open all office docs, including anything up to Office 2207 file formats

Thank you so much. You have answered both my questions. I have been looking to purchase Office 2004 [Mac] for it but wasn't sure that would do it since the only Office I currently own is for PC and include, 98 [which does install on XP but not on Vista], 2000 and 2008 [which was a huge mistake]. I should be okay then in getting the 2004 version. Thanks again.