Hello--I'm in a frustrating situation. Recently, we upgraded to Excel 2007
from 2003. First of all, I CANNOT FIND THE "HELP" FUNCTION in 2007, no
matter what tab/list i click on, and it's driving me crazy. (I reall don't
see how this made office "better" than 2003, as now almost every office
program I use does NOT work the same way and there are things I could do
before that I can't anymore and it makes me angry more than anything else)
Any ideas?

To the more urgent matter at hand:
I work with large spreadsheets, multiple columns for data and rows for each
individual's input. Because I usually end up with thousands of rows for each
project, it's easiest for me to have a drop-down list at the top, with the
column headers, so I can quickly and efficiently find all individuals with
certain criteria (eg, if I select "teacher" from the drop-down menu for
occupation, it automatically filters the data below to only include the rows
where "teacher" is the occupation). anyway, in Excel 2003, I could easily do
this by selecting data validation and "list," it would generate a drop-down
of items below, with the options in the drop-down being "sort ascending, sort
descending, top 10, custom, x, y, z, etc, etc, etc" (with x, y, z being
whatever my values below were). It also DOES NOT repeat X,Y,Z, and does not
include spaces, etc and I believe automatically alphabetizes as well.

However, when I try to do this in Excel 2007, it creates a list as long as
my spreadsheet, includes multiple versions of the same input, and includes
spaces, if there is a column taht is blank (does not matter whether I check
"ignore blank values" or not). I tried doing applying a "filter" adn
selecting the entire column, which does it in almost the same way i'm used
it--except, i can pick to UNSELECT certain variables, not select them--eg.
when I have a list of over 200 different variables, it makes more sense for
me to just click on one and have those items pop up rather than de-selecting
199 to get the one I want.

Also, now when I open any of the spreadsheets I had created from 2003, it
applies the same "filter" idea to the list, to make it obsolete again (where
I have to uncheck everything to get the one I want), rather than the way I
had it before.

any ideas?