Not having tried 2007, perhaps I shouldn't speak too harshly, but...
From what I keep reading in posts like yours and others, the real end users
of the world seem to get the impression that more time was spent converting
it all to a new format that is incompatible with previous versions of Excel,
is enterprise or web centric in new features it did implement, and some
almost intiuitively obvious enhancements such as you mentioned have been
largely ignored.
What I keep reading is to the effect of "yes, we love the extended
specifications - more rows, more columns, longer formulas - but the new
platform is relegating my legacy packages to the Goodwill bin". The
unfortunate side of it all is that it is definitely too late in the game to
go back and fix the things that appear 'broken' out here in end-user land. I
personally am not looking forward to the headaches I'm already imagining in
trying to exchange files back and forth between the company I'm with and
those that will upgrade to 2007 that we communicate with regularly. I know
that the company I'm with has already made a conscious decision NOT to
upgrade from 2003 to 2007 until either 2003 becomes unsupported or our major
customers start demanding everything from us in 2007 format. Harsh side of
that for us is that they have deeper pockets than we do and the demand could
come early on after the release of Office 2007. Then we have a choice: make
a major effort to convert every intra-office package we have to 2007 or run
in a mixed environment of 2003/2007 setups :-(
Someone will say "well, why not just use 'save as' an earlier format" and
I'd have to respond to that one with something like "because my end users
either aren't that sophisticated or they do not want the inconvenience of
having to remember to save one way one time and another way at other times -
they want to just SAVE".
On the up side? Well, it looks like there'll be a continuing demand for
those of us in small outfits that act as "the computer guy" - filling
IT/IS/Help Desk functions in a small organization <g> Job security is a nice
thing, I suppose.