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Office 2003 Service Pack 1

There’s a new update for Office 2003 called Service Pack 1. We tell you what is supposed to be in SP1 and how you can install it.

There’s a new update for Office 2003 called Service Pack 1 (SP1 to its friends). As regular Office Watch readers know, updates to Office have always been full of, shall we say, surprises for the unwary.

So in this issue we’ll tell you what is supposed to be in SP1 and how you can install it. In the next issue we will tell you what is really happening, after we’ve had some time to test SP1 and see how it is behaving.

Historically Office updates have had some problems with the installation / updating process – once the update is installed the programs usually work OK. Microsoft is usually sluggish about posting details of any problems that arise from the Service Pack.

If you’re wondering what to do, we recommend you hold off downloading and installing SP1 for a few days or weeks.

WHAT IS UPDATED IN OFFICE 2003 SP1

Office 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is a collection of fixes for bugs – sorry ‘issues’ – in the various programs that make up Office 2003. Some of the fixes are for bugs already admitted by Microsoft, others are fixes for bugs that the company has not previously acknowledged. SP1 replaces and includes the previously released security updates for Office 2003.

According to Microsoft the following packages are covered by SP1:

  • Professional Edition 2003

  • Basic Edition 2003

  • Standard Edition 2003

  • Student and Teacher Edition 2003

  • Access 2003

  • Access 2003 Runtime

  • Excel 2003

  • FrontPage 2003

  • InfoPath 2003

  • Outlook 2003

  • PowerPoint 2003

  • Publisher 2003

  • Word 2003

  • Office 2003 Web Components

  • Office XP Web Components

In other words all the many and varied Office 2003 bundles and separate products.

The most interesting item on the list above is the last one. It seems strange that “Office XP Web Components” are patched in what is otherwise an Office 2003 update. We’ve queried this from Microsoft but not had a reply yet – so we can’t tell you if Office XP web components are really patched or this is a typo. If you think the latter option is unlikely you haven’t had to suffer the spotty documentation that has often accompanied Office updates.

There is a single downloadable update for the ‘major’ Office 2003 programs – Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook and Access plus shared programs.

There’s also separate SP1 updates for OneNote 2003, Project 2003, Project Server 2003 and Visio 2003.

The main SP1 download is 18MB but there’s a larger version for people in specific circumstances that is a whopping 73MB. You can presumably get the update from the Office Update Service (Help | Check for updates on any Office 2003 program) but we’re still dubious about the reliability of this method for distributing updates. We’re more comfortable with the idea of downloading the patch separately and installing it when you’re ready – it is also the more efficient way to do it when you have to update more than one computer because you only have to download the patch once.

You can find the links for the main SP1 patch at the bottom of this page.

Though there’s nothing explicit in the directions from Microsoft, it seems prudent to update all your Office 2003 programs at the same time. While it may be possible it’s possibly troublesome to try mixing the original and SP1 versions of Office 2003 programs on the same computer. For example, applying the main SP1 patch but leave Project 2003 or OneNote 2003 unpatched.

The additional SP1 patches are available at these pages:

WHAT’S NEW

With the exception of OneNote 2003 there seems to be little, if anything, in the way of new features in SP1. All the changes seem to be bug or security fixes.

WHAT’S GONE

If you install Service Pack 1 then you will lose access to Microsoft’s Internet Free/Busy Service. This feature is being discontinued later this year so access to it is being dropped at this time.

So if you use the Internet Free/Busy Service then you need to find a replacement fairly soon and not apply any SP1 updates until you do.

BUG FIXES

There’s a list of bug fixes for each Office 2003 program, as in the past the fixes fall into two broad categories: those that have been detailed in Knowledge Base articles and those that have been kept secret by Microsoft until there’s a fix available.

Some of the important fixes are:

WORD:

The document contains no comments or tracked changes” message when reviewing a document for tracked changes in Word 2003 – Knowledge Base article (KB).

An XML file that contains line breaks and base64-encoded data does not open in Word 2003

You receive an error message after you save a Word 2003 document as a PDF file by using Adobe Acrobat 5.05 PDFMaker

OUTLOOK:

The envelope part of an e-mail message is missing when you send multiple e-mail messages from an Office 2003 program.

Smart Tags in Outlook 2003 email messages do not function after you install Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2.

A full download of (an Exchange Server?) address book always occurs in Outlook 2003.

If you create a new Outlook 2003 rule in Outlook Web Access, many of your previous rules may be missing.

EXCEL:

Subtotals or grand totals may be incorrect when a pivot table calculates any form of the VAR function, the VARP function, the STDEV function, or the STDEVP function.

Excel 2003 stops responding if you switch to another program while the “cell validation” dialog box is open

FRONTPAGE:

You cannot include an Active Server Pages (ASP) page in another ASP page.

The Advanced view of an XML page subview is blank on a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Web site.


There’s a complete list of all the fixes in SP1 available as an Excel worksheet from here.

ONENOTE 2003 UPDATE

As we’ve noted in past Office Watch articles – OneNote 2003 has a nice set of extras in SP1 plus some bug fixes. Unlike the main Service Pack there was a ‘preview’ or test version of the updated OneNote made available to the public.

If you’ve been using the OneNote 2003 Preview version you should uninstall it BEFORE installing SP1. Then install the original OneNote 2003 again before applying the SP1 patch. Step-by-step directions and a good list of fixes can be found here.

We’ve talked about the good new features in OneNote 2003 SP1 and they are nicely summarized here.

But the most interesting thing about the OneNote SP1 list isn’t what’s there but what isn’t. All the bugs that are fixed have Knowledge Base articles giving details of the problem – on the fix lists for other parts of Office you’ll see some bugs have been publicly acknowledged in the Knowledge Base while others have been kept secret by Microsoft until the Service Pack is released.

The OneNote SP1 update is separate download to the main Office 2003 SP1 patch.

INFOPATH 2003 SP1

Like OneNote there was a Preview version of the SP1 update for InfoPath but if you have that installed already you need to read the following advice from Microsoft BEFORE installing the Office 2003 SP! update:

“Information to consider before you install Office 2003 Service Pack 1 on a computer that has the InfoPath 2003 Service Pack 1 Preview installed”. Details here.

MULTILINGUAL SUPPORT TO COME

While Service Pack 1 is available, the matching update for the Office 2003 Multilingual User Interface Pack (MUI) is not.

You should wait until both updates are available before applying SP1 to any computer using the MUI.

NO WAY OUT

Once you’ve installed Service Pack 1 there’s no direct way to uninstall it. To remove SP1 you would have to uninstall Office 2003 entirely then reinstall from the original CD’s.

 

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