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There's a big difference between the 2003 and 2007 versions of Excel and the other MS Office programs as well. As I have been teaching adult students both versions in a computer school, I have seen some interesting reactions to the new version.
It seems that people who have previously used Excel 2003 have quite a large learning curve getting used to the way Excel 2007 is structured. It is graphically enhanced in a major way which is a good thing for people in advertising and media companies and other places that use graphics. But students are finding it difficult to figure out where everything is in the program as the layout in 2007 is so different. In general they seem to like it in the end but it's a struggle to get there and they still need to use the program quite a bit more before beginning to get comfortable with the new version.
However, those students who never learned the older versions like 2007. Since they have nothing to compare it to, they seem to like the graphical interface and enjoy learning the program.
But I'm seeing an interesting trend that I want to do more research on. I'd like to see how much of the marketplace is buying up licenses to Excel 2007 and MS Office 2007 vs. sticking with the older versions. Without having done much of the research so far, I would have to guess that 2007 is not taking off like Microsoft wanted or expected it to because I see an extremely light signup rate of students eager to learn the 2007 version whereas the 2003 courses are still getting a majority of signups.
Simply stated, if the enrollments at my school represent a sample of what's going on in the business world, then companies are just not rushing out to buy licenses to Microsoft Office 2007 as they are costly and then training the staff to use the new program is very time consuming and there may be few benefits to the company to use the new version, if they don't use a lot of graphics in their spreadsheets.
I predict that the older 2003 version of Excel and the other 2003 MS Office programs will remain strong in the marketplace for many years to come even though Microsoft will discontinue support, because it is a very robust version of the program. Many companies simply don't stand to gain very much and will not want to spend the money to buy it and train their staff to use the new version.
Time will tell!
EXCEL 2003 vs. 2007
thank's recompense the interesting advice