You might give Open Office a try. It is free including any updates. I 
hardly notice any differences from Excel. Open Office will work with MS 
Office files and will save your work in that format if you desire.

Tom

On 3/2/2010 8:53 PM, James Harris wrote:
> After 10  happy years my Excel  has de-celerated!  Starting a month ago every time after working for from 5 minutes to one hour on an Excel spreadsheet I get a window:  "Excel has encountered a problem and must close..."  I have the option of either reporting to MS - or not.  Either way, Excel closes.  Can re-boot immediately but the same window will reappear - even sooner.  I've contacted MS support who very politely told me they don't support MS Office 2000 anymore.  Their advice:  "Buy our new Office suite." I re-installed my Office and now can't install any updates -when I tried to to install Office  SP1 I got a window which said "The expected version of the product was not found on your system".
>   I'm running Office 2000, Small business edition on MS XP Home, SP3.   No other problems.
> On the MS forum the only info was others had the same problem and the only work-around was to use "Open Office" app - which I've been doing, but I prefer my old Excel.
>
> Anybody out there have a solution?  Need more info?  Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> 		Jim Harris,  Philadelphia
>

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