Microsoft Launches First Service Pack for Office 2010

Microsoft (News - Alert) yesterday rolled out Office 2010 SP1, a collection of new features and fixes and a rollup of previous security updates for its popular office suite.

IT admins who support Office 2010 at your organizations should try out the new service pack in a test environment with an eye toward rolling it out to your users when you’re ready. Those of you who use the 32-bit version of Office 2010 can download SP1 from its page at the Microsoft Download Center. And any of you use the 64-bit version of Office can download the service pack from its own separate page. SP1 is also available as an important though not automatic update through Microsoft’s Windows Update.

The new features and fixes affect all of the standard programs in the suite, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, OneNote, and Outlook. Microsoft has detailed all of the changes on its support page for Office 2010 SP1. You can also download the following spreadsheet that lists all of the new features and fixes for every Office 2010 application. But here are some of the most prominent ones:

Word 2010 SP1

• Fixes an issue in which users receive the following error message when opening a Word 2010 document. “The file <file name> cannot be opened because there are problems with the contents.”
• Fixes an issue in which users receive the following error message when opening a Word 2010 document: ”Microsoft Office Word has encountered a problem and needs to close.”
• Paragraph indents are no longer lost when you edit other paragraph properties.
• Fixes a rendering problem that occurs when you insert a graphic into a Word document, and then save the document as a HTML file.
• Fixes several editing conflict issues that occur when you use the Word Coauthoring feature.

Excel 2010 SP1

• Improves the overall stability, performance, and backward compatibility with earlier versions by addressing bugs that affect lots of users.
• Function names now maintain backward compatibility with earlier versions of Excel for the Czech, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish languages.

PowerPoint 2010 SP1

• Fixes an issue that a default language change is not propagated to new slides or to new presentations.
• Fixes an issue in which an incorrect animation state occurs after you browse through all the slides.
• Fixes an issue in which you receive the following error message when you edit or enable an Excel object that contains Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code: “Error accessing file. Network connection may have been lost.”
• Fixes an issue in which audio or video media that was created on a Mac-based computer does not play back on a Windows-based computer.

Access 2010 SP1

• Fixes an issue that occurs when you try to export an Access file to an Excel workbook.
• Improves the performance when publishing client forms from Access that contain embedded images

OneNote 2010 SP1

• Added a new Open from web option that is located under the File Open menu that enables you to open OneNote notebooks from Windows Live SkyDrive.
• Improves how OneNote synchronizes with SharePoint or Windows Live SkyDrive.
• OneNote 2010 SP1 now uses Windows Live Essentials to log on to Windows Live SkyDrive.
• Fixes an issue in which the incorrect style is used for the next line after a pasted link.
• Improves performance when a shared notebook is used by lots of users who use section groups.
• OneNote 2010 SP1 now correctly scrolls when the mouse pointer is near the edges of the screen.

Outlook 2010 SP1

• Outlook 2010 SP1 includes Office 365 support.
• Outlook 2010 SP1 can be set to always use the default sending account.

I installed Office 2010 SP1 on a test PC, and the installation went smoothly. After the SP1 update complete, I ran some of the Office 2010 applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and each one worked as per usual.

Of course, you’ll want to thoroughly test Office 2010 SP1 before you consider deploying it at your company. But based on initial impressions, it should prove to be a relatively painless upgrade.

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