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Microsoft's Office 2007 Service Pack 2 is now available, boasting a set of compelling file format support enhancements alongside the typical service pack fare of bug fixes and performance tweaks. Most dramatically, Office 2007 SP2 adds full support for Office's archrival OpenDocument formats, as well as built-in capabilities for publishing documents to Adobe's PDF and Microsoft's own XPS formats. To download SP2, go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b444bf18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5'target
By Jason Brooks
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- Microsoft Update
With the Microsoft Update option enabled, Windows Update offered to upgrade my Office 2007 installation to SP2. - Tipping the Scales
On another system, I downloaded the service pack, which weighed in at a considerable 290MB, from Microsoft's site. - Clicking Through the Upgrade
The SP2 install process was pretty standard, with a series of clicks, followed by Windows' requisite reboot step. - SP2 in the House
It took me a little while to find Office 2007's "about" dialog, but once I did, I could confirm that SP2 was installed. - ODF 1.1 Support
Office 2007 adds support for ODF Version 1.1, but OpenOffice.org 3.0 and later default to ODF 1.2. In my initial tests with files saved in both versions, however, I didn't experience any miscues. - ODF Support in Word 2007
I started out opening a simple ODF text document in Word, and the document rendered well. - Familiar Formatting Issues
I turned next to a more complex document, and found that Word (on the left, below) added an errant page break—I've seen just this sort of formatting issue when opening certain Office documents in OpenOffice.org. - Office 2007 as ODF Converter
I wanted to test how well Office 2007 converted its own native documents to ODF files. Below is a Word 2007 DOCX file that I opened in OpenOffice.org. Notice the misplaced image. - Save in ODF Format
I opened the same DOCX file in Word 2007 and saved it in ODF format from the standard Office save menu. - Are You Sure?
Word gave me a typical warning about the possibility of losing certain document features by saving in ODF format. - Word 2007 Can Be OpenOffice.org's Pal
After saving the DOCX file in ODF format in Word 2007, I opened it again in OpenOffice.org. I found that my image placement issues were largely abated. - Some Image Issues Remained
My DOCX-to-ODT conversion wasn't perfect—I still had a few misplaced images. - Nobody's Perfect
With that said, I found small image placement issues when opening that same DOCX file with Word 2007. - ODF as Default
In Word 2007, I could opt to save all my text documents in ODF format moving forward. - Fun with Feature Incompatibility
Excel 2007 can handle spreadsheets of up to a million rows, while Calc tops out at 64,000 rows. I wondered what would happen with a million-row ODF spreadsheet. - Save as ODS
As with Word 2007, I could save my million-row spreadsheet to the ODS format using the regular save menu. - Crashing OpenOffice.org
Not surprisingly, OpenOffice.org Calc crashed when I tried to open the too-large spreadsheet file. It still worked fine with Excel 2007, however. - Save as PDF
Office 2007 now supports publishing documents to PDF format—something that required a separate download pre-SP2. - Yes, It's a PDF
I opened the document I'd published in PDF format, and all of the formatting in the original document appeared to carry over properly.
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