Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 Released
Microsoft on Tuesday released Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007, a big update to its productivity suite. With the next major version of the suite—Office 10—not due until early next year, SP2 will be the dominant version of the world's leading productivity software for a while.
The most newsworthy capability added by the service pack is support for a broader range of file formats, Open Document Formats (ODF, the open-standard document formats used by OpenOffice) and Adobe PDF in particular. It also allows users to uninstall service pack updates individually, using Microsoft Service Pack Uninstall Tool for the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite. PCMag.com got an early look at the service pack, though not at the uninstall tool.
It's been speculated in the tech press that the support for Adobe's page definition format finally being baked into Office was a result of a court ruling or agreement with Adobe, but since many other third-party products have long included the ability to save to PDF format, the move seems more a sign of Microsoft acknowledging the popularity of the competitor's format. Incidentally, the option for saving as PDF also offers to save the file in Microsoft's competing XPS format.
A representative for Microsoft explained the move as follows: "As far as including PDF, this is not a result of a court ruling or some other agreement. The decision to add PDF, and XPS, support to Office is consistent with our long held belief that customers should be able to choose the document format that best meets their needs in a given situation. This is why Microsoft has supported many formats in Office in the past and is including support for these additional formats in SP2."
Microsoft also claims improved performance with multiple graphics elements present, better printout quality, and as the Office Sustained Engineering blog notes, "Improved interoperability using standard DrawingML markup to describe the visual properties of the SmartArt graphic and Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication support in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and SPD." Those last won't affect most everyday users, but there are many fixes and app-specific updates that will be welcome productivity adds. Access gets the ability to export reports to Excel spreadsheets, Excel gets improved charting functionality, and Outlook and PowerPoint get improved performance.
Service Pack 2 updates all editions of Office from Basic to Ultimate, and all Office applications. This means not just the biggies—Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint—but also InfoPath, Publisher, OneNote, Groove, Access, SharePoint, Project, Visio, and InterConnect. It also updates shared ancillary programs such as Proofing Tools, Printing Assistant, and Viewers, plus updates for all languages.
Service Pack 2 includes more than 2,000 updates in all. For this reason, the update can take a while if you have a lot of apps that haven't been updated.
The Microsoft team warned me that the update could take more than an hour to install, but on a 2GHz dual-core Athlon Vista machine with 2GB RAM, it only about 15 minutes. Of course, the update time depends on how many Office apps are installed on your system, how up-to-date they are, and the speed of the system itself.
When I tried the new Saving to PDF feature, it worked without a hitch, and now the option for that and for OpenDocument Text format appear right in the main Save As choices in Word. In my tests, PDFs saved complete with fonts, formatting, and images.
I did run into a snag on an XP machine: I was unable to install SP2 on an XP system running Office 2007, getting the error "A failure occurred during installation." The error noted a Knowledge Base article I could look up to see what was going on, but the KB article had not yet been posted at the time of my testing. On other test systems, the updater sometimes produced a dialog stating "There are no products affected by this package installed on this system." Despite this message, the Office programs' About dialogs showed that the version was now SP2.
My guess is that because the updater consists of two executable program files, the second did not contain new updates for my setup. When the update is released on Microsoft Update and Download Center, this two-step process may not be necessary.
SP2 also includes server product updates: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2 include fixes and performance improvements. The servers also support more Web browsers, and will run on Windows Server 2008 R2 at its release. SP2 also improves Groove Server's synchronization reliability, LDAP connectivity, and "robustness."
For more information on and links for downloading Office 2007 SP2, head to TechNet's Office Sustained Engineering blog.
The most newsworthy capability added by the service pack is support for a broader range of file formats, Open Document Formats (ODF, the open-standard document formats used by OpenOffice) and Adobe PDF in particular. It also allows users to uninstall service pack updates individually, using Microsoft Service Pack Uninstall Tool for the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite. PCMag.com got an early look at the service pack, though not at the uninstall tool.
It's been speculated in the tech press that the support for Adobe's page definition format finally being baked into Office was a result of a court ruling or agreement with Adobe, but since many other third-party products have long included the ability to save to PDF format, the move seems more a sign of Microsoft acknowledging the popularity of the competitor's format. Incidentally, the option for saving as PDF also offers to save the file in Microsoft's competing XPS format.
A representative for Microsoft explained the move as follows: "As far as including PDF, this is not a result of a court ruling or some other agreement. The decision to add PDF, and XPS, support to Office is consistent with our long held belief that customers should be able to choose the document format that best meets their needs in a given situation. This is why Microsoft has supported many formats in Office in the past and is including support for these additional formats in SP2."
Microsoft also claims improved performance with multiple graphics elements present, better printout quality, and as the Office Sustained Engineering blog notes, "Improved interoperability using standard DrawingML markup to describe the visual properties of the SmartArt graphic and Substantial improvements to Forms-based authentication support in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and SPD." Those last won't affect most everyday users, but there are many fixes and app-specific updates that will be welcome productivity adds. Access gets the ability to export reports to Excel spreadsheets, Excel gets improved charting functionality, and Outlook and PowerPoint get improved performance.
Service Pack 2 updates all editions of Office from Basic to Ultimate, and all Office applications. This means not just the biggies—Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint—but also InfoPath, Publisher, OneNote, Groove, Access, SharePoint, Project, Visio, and InterConnect. It also updates shared ancillary programs such as Proofing Tools, Printing Assistant, and Viewers, plus updates for all languages.
Service Pack 2 includes more than 2,000 updates in all. For this reason, the update can take a while if you have a lot of apps that haven't been updated.
The Microsoft team warned me that the update could take more than an hour to install, but on a 2GHz dual-core Athlon Vista machine with 2GB RAM, it only about 15 minutes. Of course, the update time depends on how many Office apps are installed on your system, how up-to-date they are, and the speed of the system itself.
When I tried the new Saving to PDF feature, it worked without a hitch, and now the option for that and for OpenDocument Text format appear right in the main Save As choices in Word. In my tests, PDFs saved complete with fonts, formatting, and images.
I did run into a snag on an XP machine: I was unable to install SP2 on an XP system running Office 2007, getting the error "A failure occurred during installation." The error noted a Knowledge Base article I could look up to see what was going on, but the KB article had not yet been posted at the time of my testing. On other test systems, the updater sometimes produced a dialog stating "There are no products affected by this package installed on this system." Despite this message, the Office programs' About dialogs showed that the version was now SP2.
My guess is that because the updater consists of two executable program files, the second did not contain new updates for my setup. When the update is released on Microsoft Update and Download Center, this two-step process may not be necessary.
SP2 also includes server product updates: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP2 and
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server SP2 include fixes and performance improvements. The servers also support more Web browsers, and will run on Windows Server 2008 R2 at its release. SP2 also improves Groove Server's synchronization reliability, LDAP connectivity, and "robustness."
For more information on and links for downloading Office 2007 SP2, head to TechNet's Office Sustained Engineering blog.
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