Office 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3) RTM Available for Download

Office 2007 Service Pack 3 (SP3) RTM is now available for download from Microsoft. For the time being, office 2007 customers will need to head over to the Microsoft Download Center and manually install the upgrade. 

It’s worth noting that SP3 is just a standard service pack release for Office 2007, meaning that there are no new features or functionality introduced. 

Instead, the software giant focused on resolving a range of issues that still impacted Office 2007 following the advent of SP2. 

For example, Office 2007 SP3 brings to the table all the cumulative updates and public updates released after SP2. This means that customers which deployed all Office 2007 refreshes already have the vast majority of SP3 improvements. 

Here are some additional enhancements that the Redmond company highlighted:

• “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.”

As users must be aware, Office 2007 shipped only in a 32-bit (x86) variant, and it wasn’t until Office 2010 that Microsoft also provided a 64-bit (x64) version of the productivity suite. This means that the Download Center is offering only the 32-bit version of Office 2007 SP3 RTM.

Microsoft has yet to wrap up the delivery process of Office 2007 SP3, which just started with the availability of the bits on the Download Center. 

The upgrade is also served through Microsoft Update to all customers with Automatic Updates enabled, but only to customers that already deployed all Office Automatic Updates. 

According to the software giant, the distribution process of Office 2007 SP3 through AU will only start 90 days from now. 

 Microsoft also revealed some of the issues that were dealt with in SP3:

• “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.”

The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 3 (SP3) is available for download here.

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