New service pack for Office 2007 on the way

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!