RSSOffice 2007 SP1 Now in Limited Beta
By the Betanews Staff | Published August 16, 2007, 11:20 AM
Microsoft has released to a select group of testers the first beta release of Office 2007 Service Pack 1. Dubbed a "Technical Preview," those in Microsoft's TAP program will have 30 days to provide feedback to the Redmond company.
Few details are known about the service pack, such as what new features or fixes it includes, and Microsoft is remaining mum on its release plans for both Office 2007 SP1 and Vista SP1. Typically, Office service packs are simply a collection of fixes and rarely bring major changes to Microsoft's flagship productivity suite.
if that's your biggest worry, as an administrator you should know all the dialog does is modify the registry setting for that filetype, save a fixed key and take it round to each machine on a usb drive for a simple double click fix, or if they're all networked push it out to them with remote reg access tools.
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Actually file open problem is just one of our troubles, as you pointed out I wanted to fix that setting by a .reg file however I could not spare time just for that purpose, each time I hoped that MS would fix the issue. Also, my quick fix does not do a great job, it causes another problem, when a file is double clicked/opened at the explorer, it tries to be opened twice (One via DDE and another with my parameter fix "%1", and if I disable DDE some files are not opened at all or simply freeze!) I mean the whole File-Open system is problematic with Office 2007.
Besides all the negative comment I made about Office 2007, it's still a great improvement over the previous version. There are so many beauties inside, I can't live without it now.
In Excel : Row-Column limit is high, Conditional Formatting is very easy and very powerful so that you can apply formats without writing any code for rules most of the times, and the "Format as Table" thing, it simply rocks! Finally, Ribbon is a great idea, however sometimes finding an item becomes difficult. Maybe there should be a quick search box for just filtering the items with related words.
I hope Open Office will have such features as soon as possible, because Office 2007 costs too much for a home user, therefore I don't use it at home, I don't want to use a cracked version either.
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I'm very pleased to know that Office 2007 SP1 is on the way. We're currently using it at our office, and I must admit that I was the one who suggested/insisted on this version of the Office when we were planning buying Office, however so many bugs exist int this version that cause freezes and prevents working on files, specifically in Excel :(, as the System Administrator, I had many bad times at the office.
For example, whenever a fix for Office 2007 is out and applied to clients via Automatic Updates, opening the Office files via double clicking becomes problematic. I know there is a solution for this but it requires extra work for me : visit all the client machines, fix the "Open" action string for all the Office files types in Explorer's "File Types" section. I can't believe Microsoft still does not fix this setup problem.
I hope SP1 comes as soon as possible.
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