Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 updates do more than plug security holes

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 11 December 2008 03:36

Opinion and Analysis

There's more to this week's Microsoft Office 2004 and 2008 updates than just security patches. Functionality has also been improved.

Microsoft released updates to Office 2004 and 2008 plus the Open XML File Format Converter as part of December's Patch Tuesday collection of security fixes.

But the updates aren't just to plug security holes that allow maliciously crafted Word, Rich Text Format or Excel documents to take control of a system.

The Office 2008 12.1.5 update includes other changes for stability, reliability and performance, according to Microsoft officials.

There is a general improvement that reduces the chance of Office applications closing unexpectedly. This should be welcomed by those that have been complaining of mysterious crashes.

And if you've been plagued by slow typing performance in Excel or PowerPoint, an issue involving the Open Recent menu item and documents on network shares or shared folders has also been fixed.

The longest list of improvements is for Excel, which gains a slew of fixes for various calculation issues involving more than a dozen functions, stability fixes involving sorting PivotTable reports or deleting rows or columns from workbooks in certain circumstances, and improved pasting of pictures from Excel to PowerPoint or Word.

What else has been fixed in Office? See page 2.