Service Packs are usually limited to fixing bugs, but Microsoft has added some major pep to Office 2007 with Service Pack 2 (SP2). Microsoft says that SP2 is a “major performance enhancement,” and anecdotally, that is what I’m hearing from Office users.

Office 2007 SP2 became available yesterday, and will be available via Microsoft Update in August. It may be downloaded from Microsoft’s Web site.

Jane Liles, group program manager, Office Sustained Engineering at Microsoft detailed the performance tweaks in a prepared statement. “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,” she said.

Further, she added that users now greater control over visual representation of data in Excel, and that Microsoft Office SharePoint Server was given security and performance updates in addition to support for the Firefox browser.

For what it’s worth, a friend that works for a financial company IM’d me today saying that Excel 2007 is now noticeably faster. I’m also seeing similar comments being made in forums across the Web. If you’ve already made the upgrade, feel free to leave a comment here.

Even more importantly, SP2 adds significant support for open document formats. The average user may not notice it, but SP2 makes great strides toward interoperability with support for non-Microsoft document formats such as OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.1, PDF 1.5, and PDF/A.

Now, I just wonder what the incentive will be to upgrade to Office 14. The only thing that I can thing of offhand are the forthcoming Office Web services. That, and Microsoft is holding off support for ISO International standardized Open XML until that release.

 
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