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John, also suggest to your sister to join the appropriate 'projects' on the FTDNA web site. Whilst the admins will suggest the BIG-Y, they are also very knowledgable on if if would actually be worth upgrading based on your current matches.
One thing to consider, is do you have any male offspring ? If not because of your age it may be worth considering the upgrade just to be sure thar you DNA sample is good, so that you don't loose the opportunity. Sorry of that's a bit morbid, but you see a lot of posts where people delayed testing relatives, and they then lost the chance.

Richard

Ray,
   Have a look at the Chromosome Browser, and add both XF and you daughter, and do the compare.  What you may find is that in fact your daughter does match XF in the same places, but perhaps as lots of smaller chunks that are not quite big enough to trigger the match to actually be reported. 
   The reason i suggest this is from what you say whilst your total match size to XF is reasonable, its split over multiple segment's, and if 35cM is the largest its possible you daughter may not fully match you in those positions (say has 2 or 3 blocks).

Richard

Hi Helen,
    Don't pay £35 for it, wait until they do one of the special offers, i think i got mine a couple of years ago for half that as a one off charge to unlock the tools. 
    Back to your original question, yes i can view matches that i share with a match, and it does show how much DNA that shared match shares with each of us (i.e I have a match called Fred, and we both share a match with Susan, i can see that i share 28cM with Susan and Fred shares 150cM.  The important bit is you also get access to the Chromosome browser and see exactly where you match, which can be a great help if you can start positively identifying segment's as belonging to a specific family line.

Richard

I didn't see the actual announcement :-)  just saw the description on the video said the 'couple of weeks'....

I have been having a lot of dry spell's for new matches recently, and then get a drop of a dozen or so.  I wonder if they are having some processing capacity issues, which is causing them to bunch up

Hi,
    Which version of the test you go for really depends on what you want to really get from the results. The Y111 is a good starter position, and like biggles says you can upgrade later, but you are unlikey to get many usable matches from it to confirm your line with named people.  the BigY test can give a lot more recent branches, from which if you are lucky you could contain matches which your could match to an actual MRCA.
    Now looking at your living DNA halopgroup, ftDNA is showing that formed around 2600 BCE and they have results from around 60k testers spread over 11 sub-branches. I would suspect that a Y111 test would give you a more modern result than that, and put you at least into one of those 11, if not a sub-branch of one. I would suggest doing that, and then seeing how many matches you get and if any of then have gone to BigY that could bring you into a more recent time range if you upgraded. The Y-dna test though is still really a waiting game and down to luck on if you get good matches

Personally i did upgrade to Big-Y, but my group is estimated to have split off between 1360 & 1860, with the most likly time range aournd 15-1600, so i have not yet been able to get close to an matches for named people :-(

Richard