Be careful with MS Word and Excel for a survival format. Besides the file sizes being way larger than needed there are many problems with compatibility between the different versions so you may end up in a situation where you can't read part of a document on another computer because they have a differeing version. The older versions a lot of time can't read newer files and the newer versions drop support for files created by the older version unless you have downloaded the proper convertors. Then their is the issue of 'infecting' your files with whatever the latest macro virus is on the system you plug into.
Keep your file formats as simple as possible. I prefer plain text and tif or jpg pictures over multimedia information vecause the multimedis stuff is big and slow to find anything.