The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for download. It’s an official release, not a beta:
The 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1 delivers important customer-requested stability and performance improvements, while incorporating further enhancements to user security. This service pack also includes all of the updates released for the 2007 Office suite prior to December of 2007. You can get a more complete description of SP1, including a list of issues that were fixed, in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 936982: Description of the 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1.
I’ve installed it on two machines here and so far nothing has blown up. And my favorite OneNote bug is fixed: I can now use the wheel on my Bluetooth mouse to scroll through OneNote pages. Yea!
By the standards of most modern downloads, it’s practically svelte at 218MB. And it should be available via Microsoft Update shortly One major caveat: This service pack cannot, repeat cannot, be uninstalled. So be certain (or snap a good backup) if you’re the least bit concerned.
Note that this download applies to every member of the Office 2007 family except Project, Visio, SharePoint Designer, and the Office Language Pack, each of which has its own service pack (links are at the bottom of the main download page).
Ed Bott 
Office 2007 service pack and Visio 2007 service pack installs, respectively, failed miserably when I went to run them after downloading them to run locally.
I’m running Vista Business with IE7 and am fully patched according to Windows Update.
After each of these failed to install, I clicked on the report to microsoft button and have yet to receive any response.
Try as I might to support this new technology, it just isn’t working for me, yet agin. This is just another PoS from MS, IMNSHO.
Information in this eWeek article about the light testing of SP1 doesn’t exactly make me want to try it immediately, but my ears did perk up when MS said “General Outlook performance has been greatly improved, as has the way HTML is presented in Outlook.”
That’s been a long time coming, since Office 2007’s revamp of the way it renders HTML (i.e. not using IE anymore) caused a terrible performance penalty for certain complex emails, particularly any number of newsletters (e.g. CNN AM Quicknews). I’m not exaggerating when I say that rendering can be several times slower than Outlook 2003. If SP1 gets Outlook back to where it once belonged, yippee, though somehow I doubt it will.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2230248,00.asp
Even Windows Update running on my Vista Business can’t install this service pack after repeated tries.
Again, just another PoS that isn’t ready for prime time – and I’m an MS partner that’s really trying to make this new software a selling opportunity, but I just can’t….
damn
emg,
Given that several million people have downloaded these service packs and installed them successfully without any reports of the types of problems you’ve reported, it seems like you might want to look a little more closely at your particular system before drawing general conclusions.
Download 200 MB. First message says:
“Running update detection, please wait.”
Second message provides the usual heartbreak:
“The detection failed, this can be due to a corrupted installation database.”
End of story from Microsoft — now I ghet to waste hours trying to find out what’s wrong.
Yeah, Microsoft. You never fail to disappoint.
I do not know how Ed Bott knows that several million users have installed Office 200t SP1 and successfully installed them.?
Amongts my clients her [UK & France] none hvae succeeded and a Google Search reveals tens of thousands of failured installations.
It is evident that this service pack has problems whicb are not caused by just one or tow users’ systmes
Well, John, I fail to see how you can know from a Google search that there are “tens of thousands of failured installations.”
But in any case, a little closer inspection reveals that one common cause is a corrupted Office installation. Repair the installation and the service pack install properly. See, for example, this thread.
I’m perfectly willing to accept that there are problems with this service pack. There usually are. The question is how widespread those problems are. So far it doesn’t seem like they’re a big deal at all.
Ed
1 Thanks, but it does not help my problem which may be related to multi-lingual edititions of office pro 2007
2 If you select your Google search problems appropriately you get the number of occurences of the problem reported e.g
Results 1 – 10 of about 11,100 English and French pages for OFFICE 2007 SP1 Install error 1406
John, the presence of 11,000+ pages from a Google search does not mean “tens of thousands of failed installations.” But that’s a red herring.
The very first result I checked in the list was for the Microsoft Office newsgroup, where at least one person solved this problem with support from Microsoft; the problem was related to permissions in the registry.
Have you contacted MS support or posted your issue on the MS newsgroups?
http://www.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups/en-us/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.officeupdate
PS: When I Google Office 2007 SP1 Update successful I get more than 2,090,000 results.
Ed
There are a still a large number of users here in old London town who cannot install this office 2007 Service Pack 1. Ssince the holiday season ended I have spent several hours with Microsoft Technical support people trying to resolve the problem, so far without success. However today I downloaded the XLS file from the Microsoft Office site which shows all the changes delivered by the SP1. Most of them are either fixes already issued individually and the few that are not are related to way out possible security problems. So if the user has regularly installed the individually updates this Service pack is not necessary (if it is not installed you get a yellow warning -not red – after running the baseline security analyzer.
There is a lesson for me here, not to install updates from Microsoft without first checking carefully what they are supposed to do.
There is a new one this month for a way out security risk which can be really disrupt up a users network connection if TCP is being used.
Happy new Year
John
To resolve the “the detection failed this can be due to a corrupted installation database” error that I was getting when trying to reinstall office 2007 sp1, or install kb950113, kb950114 (or even kb 946691) on an XP sp3 pc with office 2007 installed, I simply renamed this regkey: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products0002109030000000000000000F01FEC\Patches
To: ‘patches_old’ – the installers then ran with no errors, and a new ‘Patches’ regkey was auto created.
For the record, windows update had said no updates were needed – it was secunia’s psi which told me word and publisher 2007 needed patching….additionally another symptom I faced was when trying to do a repair install (change) from control panel/add remove programs, the office 2007 configuration window popped up, then closed – this is also now working correctly.
Thanks Stewart,
Your registry hack worked for me. My key was named 00002119AC0000000000000000F01FEC since I have Office 2007 Small Business I’m guessing. After renaming it, SP1 installed without error.
Thanks Stewart and Smitty……that hack worked for me as well…used the key mentioned by Stewart. Very simple fix. Too bad Microsoft doesn’t tell anyone.
Guy’s
I am not a regkey hacker and I need a lot more detail before I will be confident to jump in and make changes that might kill my system.
I tried a reinstall and that failed.
I also tried to do a change from Vista’s Programs and Features and that did not work either.
-Tom-