Hi,I attended an interview today with a boutique consulting firm - and part of the assessment involved an Excel test. I was surprised to see that the firm was still using Excel 2003 - I thought that such a firm would have upgraded to Excel 2007 a few years ago.Am interested to find out whether this firm is a bit behind the times - or whether most consulting firms still use Excel 2003?thanks

Example from my firm - we are upgrading straight from 2003 to 2010 this year (and getting Windows 7 at the same time). I'm sure your boutique firm will upgrade in due course. Perhaps the reason why they didn't upgrade to 2007 in the first place was because their client's hadn't.....

*clients

Can't believe how behind the times this boutique is....hard to believe that any consultancy would still be clinging onto Excel 2003.

lots of companies still use 2003 - many seasoned excel users would argue that 2007 is hardly an upgrade but a backwards step, severely impairing productivity (due to the changes in the interface). Fine for newbies but not the pros.

Who was it then?

anon,lots of companies may still be using Excel 2003 - but what about consultancy firms, where junior members of staff labour over spreadsheets for hours & hours each day? Surely firms whose employees use Excel heavily would have upgraded by now?

@ anon: Excel 2003 is a very poor piece of software. Anyone can get used to a new user interface, but 2007 has fundamental improvements over the older version which outweigh any inconvenience anyway. Take a big Excel model in Excel 2007, and resave it in 2003. You'll see that it quadruples in size because 2007 stores data far more efficiently, and hence is far more powerful.

Your conceptual problem is that you are attempting to compare yourself with a whole firm and assuming that because both might have a similar technological requirement then the non-technological environment is also the same. It ain't necessarily so! There was story a few years ago about a MD who subscribed to an upgrade. The company's system and presumably some of his employees couldn't cope with it so it lost more than it added. A tough lesson in an economy with tighter margins. Thanks for the info about Excel 2007 though XL. As its been on this machine for some time, when a bright young thing tells me how it works, sometime like next year on a client site, my ability to use it quickly will enable a smoother transition!

I was initially very skeptical of Office 2007 and Excel 2007 above all, but I quickly changed my mind, the reasons being those cited plus1 - The same keyboard shortcuts of 2003 work in 2007 (i.e. Alt+E, S, V to paste values only, Alt+D, F, F for auto filters etc)2 - You have a lot more rows and columns in 20073 - Filters are better, there are extra formulae4 - By doing Options, Customise, you can create your own toolbar with shorcuts to all the things you use the most and these will always be displayed no matter which tab of the "ribbon" you are displaying.