We’ve been promised an update to Office 2010 for 6 months – where is it?
For the last six months we’ve been promised an update to Office 2010, Microsoft is now saying it will be out before the end of this month.
Office 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will be available to the public by the end of June with some information now available.
There are some grumbles about the ‘delay’ but we’re not too concerned. There have been too many hassles with Office Service Packs in the past so it’s good to see one released with, apparently, some deliberation and testing.
Service Pack 1 isn’t just for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher and Outlook. It will also update SharePoint Server, Office Web Applications
However, some things never change. Microsoft loves dribbling out information about updates rather than simply telling customers upfront what’s in a Service Pack.
For example, we’re told that SP1 will include all the security fixes released to date, with a long list supplied to impress novices. In fact it’s standard and proper practice to bundle security updates into the next service pack.
Microsoft will play its usual tricks with this Service Pack. They’ll fix as many bugs as they economically can (economical for Microsoft, not customers). Many bugs aren’t publically disclosed at this stage (ie there’s no Knowledge Base article) so the SP1 fix and the KB article will appear at the same time. That’s bad luck for customers who have wasted time and money tracking down a bug that Microsoft has known about but won’t admit to.
Outlook Snooze Time
A prominent example is the change in Outlook 2010 ‘Snooze Time’ behavior.
In Outlook 2007 and before, you always saw ‘5 minutes before start’ as the default snooze selection in the Reminder dialog.
For Outlook 2010 that changed to show the last snooze selection when the Reminder next appeared. For example if you chose ’15 minutes’ snooze then that value would appear by default when the Reminder dialog popped up again.
This change was deliberate based on some customer feedback but now the majority of Office users have spoken loudly and the old behavior will return in Office 2010 SP1. It’s a change that will please some people and annoy others.
What’s worse is the poor communication from Microsoft. The change in snooze default was a subject in forums since before the public release of Office 2010, yet it took until April 2011 before the company admitted to the change in a blog post. To date there’s nothing in the Microsoft Knowledge Base about this.
It’s hard to work out if this is a bug fix or not. Some ‘softies talk about this SP1 change being a reversion to Outlook 2007 practice based on customer feedback while others say it ‘fixes an issue’ which is code for a bug fix.
It’s also worth noting that Microsoft has apparently chosen the cheap fix rather than giving customers the option to have either the new ‘sticky’ reminder default or the old behavior.
Languages
Office 2010 Service Pack 1 is said to ‘update’ all 40 languages in Office as well as Sharepoint. But there’s no indication of what those updates are. Are the existing Office 2010 translations incomplete in some way?
We do know that some languages are getting updates to improve spelling suggestions: Canadian English, French, Swedish and European Portuguese.
Browser compatibility
Office Web Apps and SharePoint, once updated to SP1 will support Internet Explorer 9 natively (instead of IE8 compatibility mode) and, amazingly, Google Chrome.
Uninstall
One bit of good news. You’ll be able to uninstall Office 2010 Service Pack 1 and revert to the pre-SP1 software.
