Thanks, "macropod" -- these are two suggestions that have not been made (or
tried by me) before.

I tried several times to run Excel's 'Detect and Repair' facility. Most
times, I got an error message "Windows Installer: This installation package
could not be opened. Verify that the package exists and that you can access
it, or contact the application vendor to verify that this is a valid Windows
Installer program." I checked for Windows Installer and find that I have
Windows Installer Unicode Version 4.0.6000.16386 and also Windows Live
Installer version 12.0.1471.1025. Are either of these what Excel says it
could not open?

On one occasion, however, the error message did not appear, the installation
disk was requested, and after chugging away for some time, Excel simply said
Setup was completed successfully. Is that what I should have expected?

I have 3 networked computers (Vista desktop, XP desktop and XP laptop) and
all have Office 2000. I successfully updated both XP machines to Office
2000 SP3 (using the installation disks), but the update failed on the Vista
computer "The expected version of the product was not found on your system."
What does this mean and how can I instal SP3?

--
Lindsay Graham
Canberra, Australia
---------------------------------------------
Please reply only to the list/newsgroup so that all may benefit.

"macropod" wrote in message
...
Hi Lindsay,

I'm running Office 2000 (excluding Outlook) on Vista Home Premium and have
no problems with any aspect of Excel - including cell formatting.

Have you tried running Excel's 'Detect and Repair' facility (see under
Help)?
Is your copy of Excel 2000 fully patched (under Help|About, it should
report the version as 9.0.8950 SP-3)?

--
Cheers
macropod
[MVP - Microsoft Word]


"Lindsay Graham" wrote in message
...
I asked about this issue some 6 weeks ago on two of these newsgroups, and
got a lot of advice, but no solution. Having been away for a month, I'm
now back trying to resolve what is still a very annoying problem, and I
hope that someone out there can help me.

I'm using Excel 2000 on a Vista desktop and on an XP laptop. When using
Vista, cell formatting will not work any more. For example, if I try to
apply date or custom date formatting to a cell containing '8/6/08', the
cell is not formatted as a date. The problem exists even if Excel is
opened in Safe mode, exists in both new and existing Excel files, and
exists regardless of whether the format is applied before or after the
date is entered. BUT if one of the same files is opened using the XP
computer, date formatting works as usual.

I've searched newsgroups and the web generally, and can find no other
examples of this problem. Is this an incompatibility issue between Vista
and Excel 2000? If so, does anyone know of a workaround? Can anyone
help with any other suggestions?

--
Lindsay Graham