Excel 2003 Feature?

[Fred Holmes]

In talking with my church's pastor, he remarked that the computers
they have are "hand-me-downs" and have on them the software they were
donated with. His computer has MS Office 2003 and the parish
secretary's computer has Office 2000. Apparently there is some
feature in Excel 2003, that isn't in Excel 2000, that involves
"sorting a list/databse" and a "dropdown list." If he passes the
database (unstated, but presumably a list of the members of the
church) to the church secretary, the information generated by this
feature is lost when the secretary loads, edits, and saves the file,
and then passes the file back to the pastor. (The file may be on a
server, but it wasn't spoken of that way.)

Can someone identify this feature. What is it called? What does it
do?

I'm currently using office 2000 because it seems to meet my needs as
it is, but this feature may be worth an upgrade if I can understand
what it is/does.

TIA

Fred Holmes

 

[Dave Peterson]

I bet it's the List.

In xl2003, you can use:
Data|List
to turn a range into a list.

This was added in xl2003 (IIRC).

Or it could just be an enhancement to the Autofilter|dropdowns. There is an
option under those to sort the data by the field in either ascending or
descending order.

And Lists are superseded by Tables in xl2007.

This feature (however nice) would not be the one to push me into upgrading.
(Maybe the ability to color the tabs would, though <vvbg>.)

But I don't use Lists very often. People who use them seem to praise them for
all the enhancements.

I find working with ranges and data|sort sufficient for most things I do.

You may want to ask if you can just play around with a copy of one of those
files on his pc with xl2003. If you find it a feature you can't live without,
.....

 

[Harald Staff]

Hi Fred

Excel 2003 works with "Lists", which is a table with Autofilter
automatically enabled (which would be the dropdowns). The list auto-expands
when you add headers and new rows and an optional subtotal row at the
bottom. I don't think it has more real functionality than Autofilter + Sort
does in 2000, except perhaps easy Export to XML.

Text on this here: http://tinyurl.com/ddx8xt

HTH. Best wishes Harald

 

[Fred Holmes]

Thanks, Harald. Just what I was looking for.
Fred Holmes