Sum function problem

**zippypong** · 03-03-2013, 03:10 PM

Hi,
I'm new to the forum and had difficulty finding an answer to my problem. Maybe it was too basic, but maybe someone has advise to offer on searching.
For others who may have experienced the same thing, my problem was the sum function not working correctly, and the cause was cells formatted as text rather than numbers. Oddly, selecting and reformatting the cells didn't fix the problem. But if the cells were selected and the pop up error box accessed, a "Convert to number" option remedied the issue.
On a different tack, is there any reason to upgrade from my Office 2003 to one of the newer versions? The older versions of Word, Excel and Access seem to cover my needs.

**xladept** · 03-03-2013, 03:57 PM

The only thing that Excel 2007 and beyond have to offer is their huge file sizes - but, you get to contend with the ribbon and, if you work with shapes then your shapes won't shape up.

**zippypong** · 03-03-2013, 05:15 PM

ribbon? shapes?

**xladept** · 03-03-2013, 05:47 PM

The ribbon screws up your toolbar controls and the shapes don't render true as they did in 2000 and 2003 - I don't know why they did the ribbon and I don't know why they screwed up the shapes????

**zippypong** · 03-03-2013, 07:10 PM

Seems to be a theme in software development, at least for Microsoft. I ran Windows XP for a few years with NO problems... fast enough, very reliable. Then my 'puter died and no one sold machines with XP, so I ended up buying an HP PC with Vista. Slight step backwards. I "upgraded" to Windows 7. Another step in the wrong direction. W7 is amazingly slow at times. Click to empty the trash and it may take 8-9 secondsfor a dialogue box to appear. The other day I waited the better part of a minute for a directory to appear on Windows Explorer and finally gave up. Today W7 computer took 7-8 seconds to move a small file from one directory to another.

My company uses MIDI to download software to our products and customers can do the same to keep their products up to date. Well... Microsoft removed the MIDI utility from W7, and when I began having problems it was difficult to resolve and involved switching MIDI players to effect a solution.

I know. Whine, whine. It'd be nice if some tech folks learned that different isn't better, and that real computer users don't want glitz but reliable and easily accessed power and functionality.