Office 97 – missing soffice.exe

I have had Office 97 put on my pc by a local company but have not been given the disk as i did not purchase this product or indeed did not ask for it to be put on – however i do find it useful.
Main problem is that after saving a word document to either c:\ or a:\ i cannot later open the document – window comes up saying that soffice.exe is missing and is needed to open the file. I can get around this by opening word and then opening from within that window but the real problem comes when someone sends me a word document and i cannot open it at all.

Is this program soffice.exe something that was never installed? If so can i download it?