Office 2004 - Service Pack 1

[Moogs]

Anyone tried it yet? It wasn't up on MS' servers earlier in the day but it's available now. Will install and report back. Hopefully it fixes the annoying Entourage sorting bugs, etc.

[torifile]

I don't suppose you've got a Lotus email server you need to check to see if they've got that bug worked out. (They had this same but in Entourage v.x, fixed it in sp1 or 2 and broke it again in '04 :rolleyes: )

[MCQ]

In related news... security update for people using Excel 2001 or Excel v.X... remote code execution vulnerability.

Download link:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9889BEAE-4771-415D-8070-3E51F4CC7AE3&displaylang=en

And, since Microsoft's link to an explanation from the above page sucks, here's the details:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-033.mspx

[staph]

I've installed it, but I'm not exactly what you'd call a regular Office user (read: once per month on average), and I don't even have Entourage installed.

All I can really say is that the programs successfully launch, even after the update. Pity. ;)

[Moogs]

I'm just amazed they got a service pack out in less than six months. That's amazing for MS.

PS - Entourage 2004 is still buggy as hell in the way in previews and handles individual mail documents in the three column view. Compacting / Repairing doesn't seem to fix the issue.

[Chinney]

I have a question regarding Office 2004. I currently have Office v. X and I wonder how much better 2004 is than v. X. And I am not asking about the new features in 2004.

Instead, what I want to know is whether Microsoft has fixed, in the 2004 version, some of the basic performance issues that affected v. X. These performance issues were the subject of numerous old threads back at AI, and I must say that I experienced some of them. The three most annoying, from my perspective (all in Word), were

1. Basic speed issues: for example, annoying time lags in displaying characters on the screen as you type.
2. Arbitrary screen refreshes: sometimes, after a given input, Office finds the need to do a whole screen refresh even when it would normally be totally unmerited by the nature of the input.
3. Character spacing on screen: depending on the font and the zoom % chosen, Word sometimes spaces the characters displayed on screen either too far apart or too close together, which sometimes makes it difficult to see where one word ends and the next begins.

I know that other people had additional problems. None of them were the end of the world, but they were not welcome (some said “inexcusable”) in a ‘professional’ product that came at a very ‘professional’ price. And these glitches were not fixed by the service release for v.X.

Now I am sure that Office 2004 has its own glitches – most new software does – which perhaps have been fixed by this new service release. But my question is more fundamental:

Does Office 2004 fix the basic problems in v.X?

[torifile]

Does Office 2004 fix the basic problems in v.X?

Nope. Still laggy, still odd refreshes and still quirky display. On a rev. c 12" powerbook with 1.25 gigs of RAM.

[Moogs]

I would say not as laggy on my G5, not sure about the refresh issues but Entourage has a *new* bug in the three pane view that is almost certainly related to screen drawing issues (and it's annoying as hell because it can cause you to accidentally trash emails you don't want to trash, and can hide emails that are actually there but not being displayed).

Typing issues seem non-existant so far though, I will say that.

[HowardG]

For What Its Worth......SP1 for Office 2004 was mainly a security update, there may have been a few bug fixes, but its 98% security related. Hopefully we'll get a bug fix Service Pack sometime in the near future.

[Escher]

Hopefully we'll get a bug fix Service Pack sometime in the near future.

I'm crossing my fingers but not holding my breath. ;) Thankfully I don't use Outlook (I use Eudora for e-mail) so the existing bugs don't hinder my work.

Also, welcome to AppleNova, HowardG. :)

Escher