Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 3 Released

Microsoft yesterday has released Service Pack 3 for their Microsoft Office 2007 suite. The update applies to both Office 2007 as we as Microsoft Office Project, Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, Microsoft Office Visio, and Visual Web Developer.

The third service pack includes two main categories of fixes. The service pack includes all public updates, security updates, hotfixes and other updates that were released for Office 2007 through September 2011. It also includes fixes that were made specifically for the service pack. This includes according to Microsoft "general product fixes and improvements in stability, performance and security".

Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 3 is a cumulative update, which means that it includes all fixes that were part of Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2 for Office 2007. Office users and administrators can install the third Service Pack release to apply all patches to the software.

The service pack can be downloaded via Windows Update or Microsoft Update automatically, or manually from Microsoft's Download Center.

The following link points to the download of the 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 3 (SP3) on Microsoft's Download Center. The Office Language Pack 2007 is available as an alternative download as well. Please note that there is only one version of the service pack available (no 32-bit and 64-bit edition).

The core improvements are the following ones:

• Documents that require custom security trimming are not returned from alert search queries, even if the user who created the alert could see and query for these documents.
  Non-Unicode characters in certain error message strings now display correctly.
• Four new bibliography styles are now available in the "Word Citations & Bibliography" feature: Harvard Anglia, IEEE, APA Sixth Edition, and MLA Seventh Edition.
• Chinese New Year holiday is now included in the Outlook calendar for Singapore.
• Fixes an issue in which Excel 2007 sometimes crashes when you open an Excel workbook previously saved in a newer version of Excel. This occurs if the file uses a new feature that is not available in the 2007 Office system.
  Fixes issues with the Pre and Post Reform rules in the French Thesaurus.
• Fixes an issue in which encryption settings are not configurable when they are used with a file format compatibility pack converter and Office 2003 or an earlier version of Office.
• Fixes an issue in which a crash sometimes occurs when an Excel workbook is opened in Excel and then previewed by using the Windows Explorer preview pane feature.
• Fixes an issue in which Excel Slicers and Ribbon customizations are lost when an XLSX file is first saved as an ODS file, and then saved as an XLSX file in Excel 2007.

Office users and administrators who notice issues after installing the service pack can use Microsoft's Service Pack Uninstall Tool for the 2007 Microsoft Office suite to uninstall the service pack without affecting the core Office 2007 installation.