A third service pack for Office 2003, promising improved security and enhanced compatibility with Windows Vista, Office 2007, Internet Explorer 7 and Windows SharePoint Services, will be available starting today (September 18), Microsoft officials say.
You can learn about and download Office 2003 SP3 from Microsoft"s Office Update or Microsoft Update pages, or just navigate directly to the free download. (These links aren"t live as of this writing, and the Microsoft spokesman who e-mailed me late today didn"t know exactly when they"d go live, but 6 a.m. PDT was his best guess. But don"t complain to me if they don"t work then--just give it a few hours.)
The download will be 120MB for the U.S. version and "no larger than 140MB" for other languages, the spokesman wrote. Office 2003 customers who use Microsoft"s AutoUpdate feature will be notified of SP3"s availability "over the next few weeks," the spokesman wrote.
SP3 appears to address a variety of generally minor annoyances and bugs across the suite. Some examples:
With the update installed, if an Office 2003 user packages a PowerPoint presentation created in Office 2007, and the presentation is then re-opened in Office 2007, data from the original Office 2007 version will now be available.