Office 2007 Service Pack 2 Now Available for Download: SP2 Overview

— -- Microsoft today released Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Office 2007, which the company says boosts performance to programs such as Outlook by as much as 35 percent and adds support for a broader range of file formats including Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

Service Pack 2 for the 2007 Microsoft Office can be downloaded here. Microsoft is calling the update a "major performance enhancement" to the business software suite. One area of focused improvements is Outlook, according to Jane Liles, group program manager, Office Sustained Engineering at Microsoft. SP2 boosts stability and performance with Outlook paying particular attention to calendaring, she says.

"Outlook 2007 SP2 is 26 percent faster than its predecessor on a set of common e-mail tasks and is even faster, 35 percent, with larger mailboxes," Liles claims in a prepared statement.

Also improved, Liles says, is charting functionality in Excel, and more control over the appearance of SmartArt graphics (visual representation of data in Excel). When it comes to file formats Office 2007 SP2 will help you juggle Open Document Format (ODF) and Portable Document Format (PDF) files which it will now support.

Many improvements were reserved for its Microsoft Office SharePoint Server software program, which facilitates Office 2007 collaboration among users, helps manage content on a network, and streamlines access to data stored on a network. Included in SP2 are a bevy of SharePoint updates including security and performance updates as well as support for the latest versions of the Firefox browser.

You can download SP2 now manually, otherwise Microsoft says it will release SP2 via Microsoft Update in August.