Microsoft has released the third and final service pack for its Microsoft Office 2007 productivity suite. While you can go ahead and download Service Pack 3 via Microsoft"s web site right now, owners of Office 2007 can also choose to wait until the pack is downloaded automatically via Windows Update.
Service Pack 3 will be the last major update to Windows Office 2007 as official support is set to be retired by April 2012, although Microsoft might release some minor patch updates between now and then. Service Pack 3 contains all of the fixes and improvements contains in the first two packs so there"s no need to download them anymore.
In addition to all of the content and fixes in Service Pack 1 and 2, Microsoft Office 2007 SP3 has some new additions and bug fixes. Among the additions are four new bibliography styles (Harvard Anglia, IEEE, APA Sixth Edition, and MLA Seventh Edition). Also some non-Unicode characters in certain error message strings are now displayed correctly thanks to SP3.
There is one known issue listed in the patch notes. Apparently there are problems if people install both the 2007 Office suite SP3 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SP3. The patch notes don"t go into any specifics and there"s no word if this issue will be fixed in a later patch.
Microsoft has, of course, released Microsoft Office 2010 as the latest version of the software suite. There"s no official word about any plans to release a new version of Office to coincide with the release of Windows 8.