Service Pack 1 arrives for Office 2008

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 14 May 2008 03:35

Opinion and Analysis

We knew Microsoft was about to release a security update for Office 2008, but a full-blown service pack came as a surprise.

Weighing in at a hefty 180M, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 1 (12.1.0) is a wide-ranging update for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage. Changes are aimed at improving security, stability and performance.

The security content relates to a pair of vulnerabilities in Word that can be exploited with maliciously crafted RTF or Word documents. Successful exploits could take complete control of the system, but Microsoft officials said the company is unaware of any attacks or proofs of concept.

Updates addressing these security issues in Office 2004 and various Windows versions of the suite have also been released.

I don't plan to regurgitate Microsoft's list of all the changes delivered by SP1. It's too long, and the fixes are generally very specific and therefore of interest only if you've encountered the corresponding problem.

But let's see if there are any highlights.

I've heard several complaint about picture handling. SP1 is supposed to do a better job with WMF pictures, as well as fixing a bug that caused spurious QuickTime-related messages when opening files created in other versions of Office.

What else is new in Word?

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