Microsoft announced the availability of Service Pack 2(SP2) for Office 2007 earlier today in a press release. SP2 significantly boosts the performance, stability, interoperability of almost all the products that are part of Office 2007 suite.
Microsoft published a huge list of improvements to existing features, bug fixes, performance enhances in a Excel file that can be downloaded from here.
Out of 600+ enhancements to Office 2007, the two enhancements that I like in the SP 2 are:
- Performance boost to Outlook 2007
- Ability to convert any Office document to PDF
Performance Boost to Outlook 2007
Microsoft Outlook 2007 is the most used program at my workplace – it starts as part of Windows startup programs and close only when I shut down my PC. So almost 10 hours everyday it runs on my desktop. When there is major performance boost to such an application its a great news to me. Here is what Microsoft said about the Outlook performance improvement
Outlook is where a large percentage of our users spend the majority of their work time. It’s critical that the application provide the experience that they expect and need to get their work done. Outlook 2007 SP2 is 26 percent faster than its predecessor on a set of common e-mail tasks and is even faster, 35 percent, with larger mailboxes. Users will experience considerable responsiveness and speed improvements on common, day-to-day operations like launching, synchronizing and searching. We were excited to be able to act on as much of the customer feedback as we did
Ability to Save Any Office Document in PDF Format
Gone are the days where we search for plug-ins/addons/third party applications that allows us to convert MS Office documents to PDF and vice versa. The SP2 brings the built in support right inside Microsoft Office for opening and saving any Office document to PDF. Wow!! That makes me more productive as I can just hit Save As and choose PDF as output format to create PDF File.
By the way, PDF is not the only third party file format supported in Office 2007 – It has built-in support for Open XML, ODF and PDF, along with the dozen or so other formats.
Read the whole list of 600+ SP2 Enhancements
If you want to read the entire list of 600+ SP2 changes, you can read by downloading this Excel file
Download MS Office 2007 Service Pack 2
You can download the 290MB installer of Office 2007 Service Pack 2 from here
When Is Office SP2 Pushed To Windows Update?
Microsoft will release SP2 via Microsoft Update’s automatic update mechanism no sooner than three months from now, and with at least 30 days notice.So its going to be a long delay for the users who want to get SP2 through Windows Update.