Office 2007 Service Pack 1 - a cautious first look

Office WatchLast updated: 17 July 2018

The first service pack for Office 2007 has been released and, as usual, you’re better off waiting a while.

The documentation on the changes in Service Pack 1 (SP1) is still in limbo with several key Microsoft documents still unavailable at the time of writing.

Links on Microsoft’s own support site to specific installation information (KB article 943589) are not yet available – you can try here to see if it’s been fixed.

The important list of fixes in Excel worksheet form is also unavailable despite links on other support pages to this file – again try that link to see if it’s been fixed.

There is a ‘white paper’ on Office 2007 SP1 at which is very much an overview.

Microsoft says the most important fix is the Excel 65534/65536 number bug though interestingly they now say the bug resulted in a false display of ‘100001’ – a bit pedantic to be sure but it hardly adds to confidence in Microsoft when there are bugs in the coverage of bug fixes. In fact the bug can display either 100000 or 100001 depending on the situation.

Much of SP1 is bundling up the small fixes released over the last year but there are other bugs repaired. As usual many of these non-security bugs have previously been kept secret by Microsoft, only admitting the problem when they have a fix.

At the moment Service Pack 1 is optional, you have to explicitly download the 213MB file from Microsoft, but early next year it’ll be pushed out to you via Windows Update.

Given the incomplete documentation and lack of wide testing for SP1, we continue our longstanding nervousness about Office updates – better to let other people be the public guinea pigs.