Discover the new SP2 for Office 2007

SP2 (Service Pack 2) Office 2007 is now available. And, surprise, it incorporates new features such as support for OpenOffice formats as well as support in standard PDF! Discover with us all the new features in this Service Pack.

Improvements and Installations

The Service Pack 2 of Office 2007 has just arrived. Like any service pack, it fixes some bugs and enhances the security of the 2007 Office suite. The performance of the following have also been improved, both of client applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint are much faster in SP2 on documents highly charged images) and the Server side applications (especially Excel and Sharepoint Services Server was boosted). In a similar vein, the quality of graphics printing was further improved for greater precision, including the graphical objects.

Last but not least, SP2 enables Office 2007 to support natively (ie without adding any extension) file format OpenDocument Format (ODF) and PDF files.

Updating your Office 2007 to SP2 is highly recommended. The SP2 is considered a critical update and it will be automatically "pushed" via Windows Update in about 3 months. But why wait? You can already benefit from the improvements:

- Open your web browser and follow this link.

- At the end of the download, you have the disk space that you have specified a file named "office2007sp2-kb953195-fullfile-en-us.exe".

- Close all Office applications, and even other applications. It is even advisable to restart the PC before installing the Service Pack to avoid any conflict.

- Double-click the downloaded file.

- Select the "Click here to accept the Microsoft Software License."

- Click Continue

- The installation begins. It is fully automatic and requires no user intervention. It takes about 5 minutes.

- At the end of the installation, the software asks you to reboot the PC to complete the integration of SP2. Answer Yes.

- After rebooting, launch Word, for example, open the Office menu, select Word Options, select Resources and click on About. The dialog should display the version number as follows: Word 2007 (12.0.6425.1000) MSO SP2.

ODF (OpenDocument Format) compatibility

Palace revolution! Microsoft eventually wants to hear talk about OpenOffice! Now, Office 2007 supports not only standard in reading the documents in ODF 1.1 (OpenDocument Format), but also their backup! In other words, Microsoft Office is finally compatible with the OpenOffice suite (the last ever, in turn, improve its compatibility with Microsoft).

How to enjoy? Nothing is easier!

1. Read the ODF files:

Whatever the Office application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), open the Office menu and select Open. In the selection box file, deploy the menu of file types and note:

- The presence of an option "OpenDocument Text (*.odt)" in Word 2007
- The presence of an option "OpenDocument Spreadsheet (*.ods) to Excel 2007
- The presence of an option "OpenDocument Presentation (*.odp)" in PowerPoint 2007

2. The creation of ODF files:

Whatever the Office application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), open the Office menu and select Save As. In the submenu that appears, select:

- "OpenDocument Text" in Word 2007
- "OpenDocument Spreadsheet" in EXCEL 2007
- "OpenDocument Presentation" in PowerPoint 2007

One can even ask the Office suite by default to save documents in the OpenDocument format. To do this (eg with Word):

- Open Office
- Select Word Options
- Select the Recording tab
- In the popup menu 'Save files in this format", select the OpenDocument format.

Creating PDF files

The Office 2007 suite already knew create documents in PDF format. But, following a dispute with Adobe, this option was not offered as standard. It was downloaded for free from the Microsoft site a plug-in adding the backup feature in PDF format. The trouble is that to take advantage of this function, it should have an Internet connection and a legal version of Office 2007.

Microsoft and Adobe have finally found common ground. With SP2, the generation of PDF becomes standard, it is automatically implemented by the installation of SP2.

To get there (in Word, Excel as PowerPoint):

- Open Office

- Select Save As

- Select PDF or XPS

- In the popup menu "Type", check that PDF (*.pdf) is selected.

- Click Publish

- A few seconds later, your generated PDF file will open automatically in Acrobat Reader.