The Office 2007 ‘Technical Refresh’ is out as a free update for anyone who has the Beta 2 version.
The Office 2007 ‘Technical Refresh’ is out as a free update for anyone who has the Beta 2 version. Microsoft calls it ‘Beta 2 Technical Refresh’ or B2TR for short. We still call it the more honest name of ‘Beta 3’.
B2TR comes are as mega-patch over Office 2007 Beta 2, that means you have to install Beta 2 first, even if you immediately apply the TR patch afterwards. B2TR for the core Office apps is a 494MB download from here there are separate downloads for other Office 2007 beta products.
The instructions on the Microsoft website are not all they could be, after warning people that B2TR is not a one click upgrade they proceed to omit any explicit instructions – instead there’s some warnings of possible problems that you can use to infer preliminary steps.
In our experience applying the Technical Refresh patch worked fairly well. As a precaution we cleaned up our TEMP directory as suggested by Microsoft. To find your Windows temp directory, right-click on the My Computer icon, Properties | Advanced | Environment Variables.
At least 2 Gigabytes of free disk space is required for the Technical Refresh update.
We’ve tried B2TR on various computers and found it is considerably more stable and faster than previous releases – but given that Beta 2 wasn’t that speedy or stable, that’s not saying much. Outlook in particular needs much more performance work before release.
To get the full Outlook 2007 ‘experience’ you’ll need to install the latest Windows Search beta for Windows XP. This additional download provides the ‘instant’ search option inside Outlook. Download and install it from here. We’ll talk about our concerns regarding Windows Search some more in a future issue but you’ll note we put the word ‘instant’ in quotes – it certainly ain’t. This download isn’t required for Windows Vista.
If you haven’t installed Office 2007 before on that Windows XP computer we suggest you use this order:
- The Windows Search beta first
- Office 2007 Beta 2
- Office 2007 Technical Refresh update
- Save to PDF and/or XPS updates from here
We’ve always thought that having separate downloads for the ‘Save to’ features to PDF and Microsoft’s new XPS format was a pointless inconvenience for customers. A triumph of corporate machinations (between Adobe and Microsoft) over common-sense. Once you’ve installed B2TR that’s even more obvious because on the Save As option is an explicit link to download the PDF and XPS features.
If you’re trying Office 2007 Beta 2 you should update to B2TR without delay, there’s no point in using an old beta.
