Thursday, December 6, 2007

Office 2007 SP1 To Be Released On Dec 11

If the developers of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) need to look for lessons on timely releases then they don't need to look far away from their desks. The developers of the Office 2007 team need to be lauded for their effort in releasing the SP1 ahead of schedule. And SP1 for Office 2007 will be released on 11th Dec, 2007.

Office 2007 was a completely revamped product and has a lot of new features including a complete change in the User-Interface (Ribbon) as well as the file formats (docx, pptx, xlsx...). Thus, it was expected that there would be a few bugs in the release. But like previous Office releases, this version was well received by the industry and the Office Suite is one product from Microsoft that has maintained its reputation of good releases.

The Office 2007 SP1 is an update based the user feedback and hence has lots of small hotfixes for compatibility. SP1 also brings a lot of improvements to the compatibility between the Office 2003 and Office 2007 file formats i.e. doc with docx. Few other improvements in SP1 include support for .Net Framework 3.5 and easy development with Visual Studio 2008. Some fixes to animated text in Powerpoint have also been added. Changes to DirectX overlay is another useful enhancement to make the Powerpoint slideshows a little slicker!!

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