Bonzo3legs -

The same formulas, and a few additional ones, still work in later versions of Office. The "instructions" actually have been improved a bit in later ones (at least for those prior to Office 2007).

I would expect any decent spreadsheet to be able to handle array functions of the kind you describe, and "statistical functions" in Excel are fairly robust.

I personally find it more amazing that you can type an equation in the Office wordprocessor (Word) and hit a couple of keys to get the result - if you know how to write the equation the right way.

Stilly -

If your Office programs have been kept up to date via autoupdates, I don't find anything at Microsoft to indicate that a separate installation of Office SP3 is needed. Your sysadmin at the office may not have kept your programs there up to date. Many larger system/network managers have not allowed the updates, in order to keep all the machines at the same level for "easier management" and to test the updates on the office machine configuration before distributing them, so there may have been a need for it at work. Your own system at home probably doesn't need it.

I took my own obsolete "Office XP Small Business" to the update site, and used the "Custom Install" option to see if it might be offered. It informed me that there are no available updates - Critical or Optional - available for my version. The only "Critical Update" that's been installed (automatically), for Office, in the past couple of months (installed 10 OCT) was a small patch for my Word 2002, which caused no problems that I've seen.

Since they inform me frequently that my Office version is "obsolete" and "no longer supported," there may be optional things available that the update site doesn't show me. Office SP3 may be one of those; but the update site continues to feed me all the Critical (security related) updates. Information for Office SP3 that I find separately indicates that it is applicable to all prior Office versions; but that anything you really need should already have been installed.

Especially if your Office version is an older one, you might want to save the Office SP3 installation file (after verifying that you have the right one) so that if you have to reinstall Office you can run the SP3 to get the reinstalled programs updated all in one shot and can avoid downloading all the old patches one at a time. It's just a rollup of earlier changes, and I don't see any indication that you need to install it on a computer that's been kept up to date.

Quite obviously, something didn't work as intended with your attempted installation; but all the "bitch pages" I've found that complain about problems similar to yours with Office SP3 indicate quite obviously (IMO) that they didn't RTFM before trying to install it, and in general have no idea what it is, what it's for, or whether they even needed to try to install it.

Your administrator at the office told everybody to install it, and may be given credit for having determined that it was needed for the systems at the office. (S)he should have tested the installation programs and instructions on the office machines before distributing the patch. You probably have your own different setup at home, so that advice probably doesn't apply to your home machine.

You might ask at the office for "clarification(?)" but you'll want to be very polite about it, since office IT managers are all incredibly overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated. (I know that, 'cause I've asked a couple.)

John