Office, SharePoint, and Project 2007 Receive SP3

The third service pack (SP3) for 2007 versions of the Office, SharePoint, Project, and Visio products shipped in Oct. 2011, primarily delivering stability and security fixes for both clients and servers. The service pack likely serves as a final major update for the Office 2007 applications, which leave Mainstream support on Apr. 10, 2012. Release of SP3 may also serve as a reminder to customers still using Office 2007 to begin planning migration to Office 2010, which was updated with SP1 in July 2011.

Desktop Applications Updated

SP3 updates are available for all desktop applications included in Office 2007 suites, their file viewers, and language packs, as well as Project 2007, SharePoint Designer 2007, Visio 2007, and Expression Web 3, which ship separately. The Access Runtime, which is redistributed with Access database applications, also received SP3.

Fixes across the Office 2007 desktop applications with SP3 include updates to ensure reliability and security, with some minor feature enhancements as well. For example, Word 2007 includes four new bibliography styles already available in Word 2010 SP1. Other issues fixed with SP3 are predominantly related to localization, security, application stability, and compatibility with files saved from Office 2010 applications.