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SP2 will add save to PDF and ODF support along with other fixes

Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world and it makes the lion's share of its profits from its Windows operating systems and from its Office productivity suite.

Microsoft has announced that Service Pack 2 for Office 2007 will be released this month. The update will be offered to users via the Windows update tool and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) for corporate users.

The first mention of SP2 for Office 2007 was made back in October 2008 reports WindowsITPro and will add some notable improvements to the popular productivity suite. Among the improvements will be support for the open-source Open Document Format (ODF) and native save to PDF functionality. The ODF format was reportedly added to meet the needs of governments and other agencies that use Office.

The WSUS team posted a blog with a little information on Office 2007 SP2:

Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Office System will be made available in April. Service Pack 2 includes some significant work, including: built-in ability to save as ODF and PDF formats, improvements to Outlook's performance and calendar reliability, significant bug fixes for charts in core Office applications, the ability for client service packs to be removed using an uninstall tool, and a host of customer-requested improvements to the Office Server products. It is also a rollup of all fixes that have previously been released for Office 2007 products.

Microsoft plans to launch its next generation operating system, Windows 7, this year and the next generation of Office will be launched in 2010. The next version of Office is tentatively called "Office 14".

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Its about damn time...
By RandallMoore on 4/13/2009 2:21:30 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
built-in ability to save as ODF and PDF formats




RE: Its about damn time...
By TomZ on 4/13/2009 2:34:59 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, I'm surprised Adobe isn't rattling the sabre again about that. I think this is a good move by Microsoft to give customers what they want.


RE: Its about damn time...
By Pirks on 4/13/09, Rating: -1
RE: Its about damn time...
By retrospooty on 4/13/2009 10:50:12 PM , Rating: 3
Wow... I didnt know you even had opinions that weren't Mac related... Congrats =)


RE: Its about damn time...
By xKeGSx on 4/14/2009 6:41:19 PM , Rating: 2
For the record, I am an avid lurker of the comments and can understand why people just rate you down for no reason now. However, this post had no reason to be rated down so I gave you a boost. But I still don't like you....


RE: Its about damn time...
By LuxZg on 4/13/2009 2:56:58 PM , Rating: 3
For PDF at least, this existed for a looong long time. Been using it all over our company. Yes, Microsoft official.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa...

Just install this MS plugin, and save in PDF in Office 2007, no problems at all.

Nice that it's in SP2 now, and I'm glad that ODF is supported as well, and even though I'm not using it - now I can start to.


RE: Its about damn time...
By TomZ on 4/13/2009 3:34:31 PM , Rating: 4
Yeah, I'm aware of the plug-in - I've been using it probably daily since it was released. But my surprise is that Adobe didn't complain about finally including it in the product, compared to their reaction when Microsoft first introduced the feature.


RE: Its about damn time...
By 16nm on 4/14/2009 4:47:32 PM , Rating: 2
I thought PDF had become an open standard but I'm too lazy to google it...


RE: Its about damn time...
By ATC on 4/13/2009 3:41:56 PM , Rating: 2
I never knew about this plugin; I just installed it. Thanks!

All along I've been using this freeware which essentially adds a printer, so a document is saved as PDF when printed using that particular printer. It worked but this is way better.


RE: Its about damn time...
By Souka on 4/13/2009 4:16:12 PM , Rating: 2
Yep... www.cutepdf.com

Free pdf making util...just print it, and you get a PDF.

I use it all the time for those "one time" coupons..heh


RE: Its about damn time...
By TomZ on 4/13/2009 5:10:06 PM , Rating: 2
The Save as PDF function is a little nicer than most PDF printer drivers, because it can create bookmarks based on document headings. I find myself doing that quite often.


RE: Its about damn time...
By AnnihilatorX on 4/14/2009 7:03:05 AM , Rating: 2
The plugin doesn't work perfectly in terms of bookmark (navigation within acrobat), some formatting issues but well it's free so you can't complain.


RE: Its about damn time...
By IceBreakerG on 4/13/2009 2:57:05 PM , Rating: 2
Well, in Microsoft's defense, Office 2007 originally had native support for PDF when it was in beta, but Adobe complained about it and started threatening them. Microsoft removed native "Save to PDF/XPS" support and made it an add-on through the Microsoft Office website. The add-on was free, and still worked the same way (I have it installed now actually). I think they're just including it natively with the new service pack so you won't need to install the add-on anymore.


RE: Its about damn time...
By RandallMoore on 4/13/2009 3:06:45 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah, I wasn't pointing fingers or anything. I understand the whole debacle with copyright/patent infringement etc. I was just glad that they took the initiative to solve the problems regardless of where it was coming from. It seems like since the Vista PR flop, MS has been taking steps to clean up their act. (Love Vista btw)

I know about the add-ons but most of the time I'm just too lazy to make those three mouse clicks haha


Office 11 was Office 2003, Office 12 is 2007 . . .
By Bateluer on 4/13/2009 1:25:03 PM , Rating: 2
At least, thats what I see when I look at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office, with Office 2003 on this machine and Office 2007 at home.

Shouldn't the new release be Office 13 then?




By Brandon Hill (blog) on 4/13/2009 1:27:53 PM , Rating: 2
It's actually Office 14 for now -- the article has been updated.


By marsbound2024 on 4/13/2009 2:20:29 PM , Rating: 2
I believe they wanted to avoid "Office 13" for superstitious reasons.


By vortex222 on 4/13/2009 2:21:28 PM , Rating: 3
New Movie... Office the 13th.

Office executives are stalked and murdered by an unknown assistant while trying to re-open a pdf document that was the site of a scareware advertisement.

...ok ok. That was poorly done, but you get the idea behind not using the name 'office 13'.


By Mclendo06 on 4/13/2009 3:13:05 PM , Rating: 2
In my Office the 13th movie:

One of the characters is at work late, unaware that she is being stalked by a murderous villian with a scary mask. Her friend was kidnapped by the same villian and somehow managed to get to a computer to send her friend an email telling her to run to safety. As the murderer arrives at the office building, the unaware friend hears the new mail sound from Outlook, but has to wait a few minutes for Outlook to unfreeze from checking the exchange server. It finally does and she reads the message and sees the villian in the reflection of her CRT at the same time, just before her life ends in typical horror-film fashion.

Needless to say I hate Outlook but have to use it with the exchange server at work. It is a horror all its own.


RE: Office 11 was Office 2003, Office 12 is 2007 . . .
By TomZ on 4/13/2009 3:36:21 PM , Rating: 2
What is your issue with Outlook? What would you rather be using - Lotus Notes?


By Bateluer on 4/13/2009 4:40:39 PM , Rating: 1
Thunderbird. Outlook is a magnet for every worm, trojan, virus, and all other assorted malware on the Internet.


By TomZ on 4/13/2009 5:08:51 PM , Rating: 2
Far and away the most common exploit is users clicking on inbound attached executables, and Outlook 2007 makes that problem go away by completely blocking user access to those types of file attachments. Based on that, I would consider Outlook to be more secure than other e-mail clients that don't do that blocking.

And besides, Thunderbird is security through obscurity, so in other words, it is only secure as long as its usage is relatively low so taht it does not become a common target for exploits.


By dastruch on 4/14/2009 3:59:50 AM , Rating: 2
Thunderbird? Superconductivity?


By amanojaku on 4/13/2009 10:06:03 PM , Rating: 3
It was Clippit, in the \\C$, with a DOCX.


IMAP fixed?
By GreenEnvt on 4/13/2009 3:13:56 PM , Rating: 2
There is some bug in Outlook 2007 in regards to the "received date" on messages migrated to Google Apps. The Received date shows up as the date you migrated instead of the actual received date. This only occurs in outlook 2007. Outlook 2003 and other clients such as thunderbird do not have this glitch.
We've had to have several of our outlook users use the "sent date" column instead of received, which has caused some hilarity when you have people with sometimes wildly innacurate date/time on the sending computers.




RE: IMAP fixed?
By Murst on 4/13/2009 4:33:18 PM , Rating: 2
That seems more of a bug w/ Google Apps than with Outlook...


RE: IMAP fixed?
By GreenEnvt on 4/13/2009 9:06:48 PM , Rating: 2
If it weren't for the fact that outlook 2007 is the only client I've found that exhibits this behaviour, I'd agree.
It could be both of their faults, there must be the date of migration included in the header somewhere for outlook 2007 to get that info, but it seems every other e-mail client (including other versions of Outlook) I've tried is capable of getting the correct date.


pardon me if im wrong
By CvP on 4/13/2009 2:56:32 PM , Rating: 2
but didn't office2k7 had save as PDF in beta (or was planned to have) but got removed due to Adobe's (LAME) objection?




RE: pardon me if im wrong
By jmke on 4/14/2009 11:26:31 AM , Rating: 2
By IceBreakerG on 4/13/2009 2:57:05 PM , Rating: 2
Well, in Microsoft's defense, Office 2007 originally had native support for PDF when it was in beta, but Adobe complained about it and started threatening them. Microsoft removed native "Save to PDF/XPS" support and made it an add-on through the Microsoft Office website. The add-on was free, and still worked the same way (I have it installed now actually). I think they're just including it natively with the new service pack so you won't need to install the add-on anymore.


Outlook 2007
By jmke on 4/13/2009 3:15:05 PM , Rating: 4
If you're an Outlook 2007 users, you'll love this SP2, it dramatically boost performance of the application, a lot more responsive, opens quicker, lists folder quicker, opens attachments faster... really quite a noticeable difference.

for those who don't want to wait, you can grab these PRE-SP2 patches already here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/961752/
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/967688/

I've installed them on 4 different machines used by different people, they all noticed the difference immediately; do check it out :)




By ranran on 4/14/2009 8:08:19 PM , Rating: 2
After 4 months of Office 2007 hair-pulling frustration with the counter-intuitive GUI, diminished efficiency, numerous compatibility issues with other software or other users of shared documents, cross-platform porting problems, and the like, I switched back to Office 2003 (except for Outlook) and haven't looked back.

...but... *sigh* I feel like one of a dying breed, yet again forced to jump through Microsoft's "this is how you will HAVE to do things from now on" hoops.
Guess I'll have to switch from XP one day, too. <sniff>




By Gholam on 4/17/2009 1:52:27 AM , Rating: 2
You'll have to abandon your horse-drawn cart one day as well.


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