Del Cotter said:
Now you can see I've never encountered anything later than 2000
Well, that's what I thought I remembered, but you said "2003 or below".
As far as I recall, adding the data label options was about the only chart
enhancement in 2002, but it was a good one. There were also a bunch of
enhancements to pivot tables. These may have made it worthwhile to upgrade,
but I hardly used 2002. When I upgraded from 97 to 2000, I was happy enough
to ignore 2002. A week or two after I finally upgraded to 2002, 2003 became
available, and it was more appealing than 2002. 2003 introduced the powerful
and useful Lists, which have become even more powerful Tables in 2007. While
the lists alone were reason enough for me to upgrade, 2003 was also more
stable than 2002 (a trend since 97 that seems to have skipped 2007). 2002
was a forgotten version, not just for me, but apparently for most users.
2007 deserves to be another forgotten version; it has a lot of potentially
nice new features, but there are too many gremlins and inefficiencies for
serious use. I only use it in virtual machines when developing for clients
who have upgraded. For my important work, I stick to 2003.
- Jon