What Service Pack 2 Means to You!

RicB — Mon, 04 May 2009 04:22:58 GMT

If you’re an Office 2007 user you should just go download SP2, install it and enjoy. However, if you want to understand the goodness that comes with SP2, read on…

OK, so what’s a “Service Pack?”

Once a product makes it out into “the wild,” which is one way of referring to the real world of users, we start hearing about work we could have done better. We actively look for reports, official and unofficial, of problems with the product. We’re looking for bugs and design issues, that are affecting users and need to be fixed. And we start working on fixing these problems in the current release even as we’re working on the next release.

This is work has to be done very carefully. Every change that we make has the potential of creating a new problem. Well discuss that process in an upcoming post, but for now we’ll just say that the changes we do make in a service pack are focused on problems that affect the success of our users, things that will make a big difference.

To be clear, this is not a time when we add new features. This is a time for making your lives better with the products we’ve worked so hard to deliver for you.

The Release of SP2

Last week we released Office 2007 SP2. A set of changes to all Office 2007 products started rolling out through Microsoft Update. There are a lot of high-level announcements out now, and including a few magazine reviews, in particular:

	The Office Sustained Engineering Blog		Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office system available today!
	ZDNet		Office 2007 Service Pack 2 available for download
	Microsoft PressPass		Office Service Pack 2 A Significant Stability, Performance and Interoperability Upgrade
	PC Magazine		Hands on with Office 2007 SP2

Yes, that’s all great news, but it still probably leaves you, the PowerPoint user, wondering…

What About PowerPoint… Specifically?

As mentioned earlier, we’ll follow this post with a couple of additional drill-downs into some of the meatier changes, and a bit about the process we used to determine what changes would make it into SP2. For now, let’s review some of the more important PowerPoint improvements.

Faster File Save

Smarter picture compression in PowerPoint’s XML file format (.PPTX) now saves up to 90% faster than before when the presentation contains a lot of pictures.

Steadier Zoom While Editing

Some commands, such as deleting the selected object when zoomed in would cause the slide view to snap to the center of the slide. Now the zoomed-in slide view does not move on its own.

Text Overlaps

Some third-party printer drivers could provide bad information, causing PowerPoint to misalign text. We now detect this situation and reference an alternate set of settings for text layout in these cases, preserving proper text spacing.

Vista Preview

PowerPoint is now compatible with the Vista file preview commands.

Image Exports

Images exported from PowerPoint when the optional registration key ExportBitmapResolution was used, could be saved corrupt or cropped. This is now fixed, and the setting produces a good bitmap.

Slide Thumbnail Highlighting

Colors and effects used to indicate when the mouse was over a slide thumbnail, and when the thumbnail was actually selected could occasionally become confused and might indicate a slide was selected when it was not. These are now clear now and update properly.

Saving to .PPT with Styled Title Text

Some of the new text formatting in PowerPoint 2007 has to be represented as a picture when saved to the older .PPT format. However, a few cases would cause both a picture and styled text to be saved into the file when it appeared in a title placeholder, giving the text a jumbled or blurred look. We now detect the situation properly and use the one correct method for these cases.

Additional changes

Many additional fixes:

International spell check errors
Printing with multiple masters
Fixes for Ricoh Aficio 1022/1027/1032 PCL6 and PCL5e printer drivers

A Lot to Recommend SP2 for You

You can review all the changes for PowerPoint and the rest of Office 2007 in the Microsoft Help and Support Knowledge Base article 953195. We hope you’ll agree that this is well worth your time and effort to install. Set up automatic updates if you haven’t already, to keep up to date now and in the future.

Enjoy Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2. We made it for you.

Ric Bretschneider
May 5, 2009

A Picture + 1000 Words…

RicB — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:54:29 GMT

We learn best by examples. And the better the example, the better the results.

That’s why its a pleasure to point you to a new group of PowerPoint examples that are stunning, inventive, evocative… simply beautiful. Nice enough if it stops there, but each and every one of these examples includes very detailed instructions on how you can reconstruct the design, and learn how to apply the technique to your own work. Animation for graphics and text, static text effects, photographic effects, new background techniques, Smart Art and transition effects… this is a holiday present come early for PowerPoint users.

And they’re free! Get them here.

Here’s a small sample, which of course does not include the amazing animated designs.

And in case you’re wondering, this is the work of PowerPoint MVP Julie Terberg of Terberg Design. Julie has done some amazing work for all you PowerPoint customers to benefit from and enjoy. Do let us know what you think!

Note: Effects and styles used in these examples do require Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 for editing.