Office 2007 SP2 will be here early in… 2009. Uh, okay. Good stuff, though.

To be fair, this is not the first time we have talked about SP2. Sev­eral months ago, we announced that we’ll be fur­ther demon­strat­ing our increased com­mit­ment to inter­op­er­abil­ity by includ­ing sup­port for Open Doc­u­ment For­mat (ODF), XML Paper Spec­i­fi­ca­tion (XPS), and Portable Doc­u­ment For­mat (PDF) in SP2. In addi­tion to those file for­mat addi­tions, some other high­lights that you’ll find in SP2 include:

For Office Desk­top Programs:

  • Improved Out­look Cal­en­dar­ing Reliability
  • Improved Out­look Performance
  • Enabling Object Model sup­port for Charts in Pow­er­Point and Word
  • Improved cryp­to­graphic func­tion­al­ity by sup­port­ing all cryp­to­graphic algo­rithms offered by the oper­at­ing system
  • Improved func­tion­al­ity in Excel’s chart­ing mechanism
  • Abil­ity to ungroup Smar­tArt graph­ics (and as a result, the abil­ity to add ani­ma­tions to them in PowerPoint)
  • Abil­ity for Visio to export UML mod­els to an XML file com­pli­ant with the XMI standard
  • Tool that enables the unin­stall of Office client Ser­vice Packs

Now that I’m using a net­book as my pri­mary com­puter, I’m really look­ing for­ward to the improved Out­look per­for­mance. Yay!