In talking with my church's pastor, he remarked that the computers
they have are "hand-me-downs" and have on them the software they were
donated with. His computer has MS Office 2003 and the parish
secretary's computer has Office 2000. Apparently there is some
feature in Excel 2003, that isn't in Excel 2000, that involves
"sorting a list/databse" and a "dropdown list." If he passes the
database (unstated, but presumably a list of the members of the
church) to the church secretary, the information generated by this
feature is lost when the secretary loads, edits, and saves the file,
and then passes the file back to the pastor. (The file may be on a
server, but it wasn't spoken of that way.)

Can someone identify this feature. What is it called? What does it
do?

I'm currently using office 2000 because it seems to meet my needs as
it is, but this feature may be worth an upgrade if I can understand
what it is/does.

TIA

Fred Holmes