Office 2007 Service Pack 2 arrives
Microsoft has released the second major update to the 2007 edition of the Office suite. It includes performance tweaks and support for Adobe PDF.
The changes to Office include updates for all the component programs, but Microsoft says Outlook has the most significant changes. Rather than adding new features, the update for Outlook concentrates more on performance and stability. The firm claims an overall average speed increase of 26 percent, with users with particularly large mailboxes seeing a 35 percent increase. Microsoft says this is particularly important as it reports “a large percentage of our users spend the majority of their work time” on Outlook.
The updated version of Office includes support for Open XML, an open standard for document files. That should allay some of the criticism Microsoft received for creating its own ‘open format’, Office Open XML, which opponents argued undermined the entire point of open standards. However, Office Open XML will remain the default file format for the Office suite.
Office 2007 Service Pack 2 also includes support for another open format, OpenDocument (ODF), plus Adobe’s PDF system. Microsoft maintains the addition of a ’save to PDF’ format is not the result of any legal pressures.
Several open source office suites already offered PDF compatibility but, until now, Microsoft Office users have had to brave the unpredictable world of shareware, trial programs and download sites to find utilities for converting documents to PDF.
The updates cover all editions of Office 2007, meaning even lesser-known programs such as Visio and One Note which only appear in more expensive editions will be updated. There are more than 2,000 updates across the programs, meaning the installation could take up to an hour.
The Service Pack is available to download now from Microsoft’s site and will be sent out through the Automatic Updates service in around three months’ time.
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May 10th, 2009
Microsoft software is so shitty, and has caused me so many serious problems – so many times, that I don’t even think it’s worth paying for.
07 is just the same crap stupidly repacked for another upgrade cycle.
What? 280M for the service pack, AND the removal tool is a separate download…..
What was so wrong with it that it took 280 Meg of EXTRA data to fix it?
The WHOLE of Open Office (.org) is about 120meg…. and it’s the ENTIRE software suit – and it’s free, and it’s way plenty good enough for pretty much everything.
There is NONE of this bullshit “basic, home, academic, small business, corporate and enterprise” crippled and rip off versions either – the Perpetual Microsoft Bullshit Trip.