David Flynn02 May 2009, 10:34 PM
A faster and more stable Outlook, better charting in Excel plus inbuilt support for OpenDoc ODF file formats are all part of Microsoft’s Office 2007 refit.
Despite the public debut of Windows 7 Release Candidate this week won’t be all about the next-gen OS. Office 2007 is also getting an update with the release of Service Pack 2.
While the 290MB SP2 is
now available from Microsoft’s download site it’s not due to be pushed out through the Microsoft Update service until at least July.
But there look to be good reasons not to wait. Outlook users look to enjoy the biggest gains from Office 2007 SP2, with Microsoft claiming the upgraded Outlook will be both much faster and more robust.
“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” according to Jane Liles, Office 2007 group program manager. “Users will experience considerable responsiveness and speed improvements on common, day-to-day operations like launching, synchronising and searching.”
These include a streamlining of Outlook’s startup process plus faster view rendering and folder switching. Searching through Windows Desktop Search 4 is said to be more reliable, while there’s been a reduction in the duplication of entries using Outlook 2007’s RSS reader (although it could be said that even one duplicated item is one too many).
Liles also cites SP2 as delivering “enhanced stability for Outlook (and) calendaring reliability, better charting functionality in Excel and more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics.”
Each SmartArt graphic with an Office 2007 document is now also saved as a separate XML-based representation using the standard DrawingML markup language for greater interoperability with users of other XML-based document formats.
SP2 also installs the ability to open and save ODF, PDF and Microsoft’s own XPS file formats in Office 2007 as a native feature rather than a separate download. This allows Word, Excel and PowerPoint users to work with files in the OpenDocument Text (ODT), OpenDocument Spreadsheet (*ODS), and OpenDocument Presentations (ODP) formats.
There’s a full list of SP2’s improvements available
here.