Office 2007 Service Pack 2 released today

The wait is over; Office 2007 Service Pack 2 has been released today. After the KB articles for Office 2007 Service Pack 2 have been made public already earlier today, the download links for Service Pack 2 are now active as well.

When it comes to Outlook, Service Pack 2 is very similar to the February 2009 cumulative update which was very much focused on improving Outlook’s responsiveness and stability. Some other notable changes and fixes in Service Pack 2;

  • The option to select which pages you want to print is back.
  • Many fixes to meetings and reminders behavior.
  • “Change Calendar Time Zone” option is removed and now available as a separate download.
  • Outlook shutdown improvements (quicker and less likely to hang when still being used by an addin or external application).
  • Downloading from POP3 will download the newest messages first instead of the oldest.
  • RSS Feeds behave more reliable (sometimes they caused duplicates or stopped updating).
  • Improved reliability with SharePoint connections.

When you launch Outlook for the first time after installing Service Pack 2, you’ll get a dialog saying “Preparing Outlook for first use.” This could take a while depending on the size of your mailbox and the amount of items in it. This is because of some changes in the indexes of the pst-file to improve performance. Don’t worry, this is one time only and it won’t break compatibility with Outlook 2003 (or in case you are still using the ANSI format, it won’t break compatibility with Outlook XP/2002 or previous either).

Outlook will also show a new icon in the Notification Area if the outlook.exe process is still running when all Outlook windows are closed already;
Outlook running in background

In addition, this Service Pack is the first Office Service Pack that can be uninstalled without first completely uninstalling Office and then reinstalling it again. So if you find the need to uninstall it again for whatever reason, you can use this tool.

View: Description of 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2) and of Microsoft Office Language Pack 2007 SP2
Download: 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2
Download: Microsoft Office Language Pack 2007 Service Pack 2
Download: 2007 Office Service Pack 2 Changes (Excel sheet)