Pack up your troubles

In recent months we’ve seen a profusion of Microsoft Service Packs, with Vista SP1, XP SP3, Office 2007 SP1 and Office 2003 SP3.

The last of these is an agglomeration of previous updates (which most users will already have installed via Windows or Office Update), improvements to stability developed in response to user error reporting and a number of new security features. This last, in Microsoft’s tough talk, “represents a major evolution in security for Office 2003. It further hardens the office suite against potential attacks and security threats”.

There are several ways of obtaining the Service Pack. The one recommended by Microsoft is via Windows Update. Windows XP and 2000 users can also use Office Update. You can also download the pack as an executable file of 117MB. This has the advantage that you can save the file and subsequently install it on other PCs without further downloads.

But be warned, there is no way of uninstalling this or other Office 2003 Service Packs. You would need to remove Office entirely, then reinstall. In theory it should be possible to remove the Service Pack via System Restore, but Microsoft makes no mention of this and, in any case, Restore Points have a limited life.

We’ll concentrate on changes that impact Word, but be aware that other Office components are also affected. One casualty is the ‘Fast saves’ option (Tools, Options, Save). These, instead of amalgamating changes to a document in a logical manner, append them to the document.

This has several repercussions ­ – it can lead to bloated files and the inclusion of deleted text that, though hidden from Word, may still be visible with a text editor. In addition, it doesn’t save much time. We’ve long advocated turning this off and it was removed from Word 2007, so this is good news.

However, Microsoft hasn’t made a very thorough job of it ­ the checkbox is still present, though we are informed it is no longer functional (see picture). Administrators can allow or disallow .com add-ins, although this requires some Registry or Group Policy editing. There are minor changes to the behaviour of Document Imaging.

The default printer driver is set to the TIFF format, but TIFF and MDI files will no longer open by default in Document Imaging, and you will no longer be able to compress TIFFs using JPEG compression. Although there is no workaround to that last restriction, it is possible to reset the default behaviour of TIFF and MDI files via Windows Explorer folder options.

The real crunch, however, as some readers have already found out the hard way, is that SP3 denies access to certain file types. These include Corel Draw (CDR) files, which may not be too much of a drawback, and Word for Windows version 1 and 2 documents.

So, if you have some Word files that have been lurking on your hard disk since 1994 or earlier you may not be able to open them as “opening and saving these file types may pose a risk to you”.

This may seem somewhat dramatic, not to say surreal, to many Word users who hitherto have lost little sleep over the revenge of the ancient killer documents, but Microsoft is either deadly serious or playing an elaborate practical joke on us. Fortunately, this is reversible.

If you go here you’ll find downloadable Registry patches or, for real hands-on enthusiasts, instructions for creating your own. So if you’ve kept your Office 2003 installation updated, don’t have stability problems, are not afraid of Word 1 or 2 documents and can turn off Fast Saves all by yourself, there’s little incentive to install SP3.

If, on the other hand, you’re installing Office 2003 from scratch, then SP3 provides a handy way of updating it in one hit. Note that SP3 incorporates the two previous Service Packs. You’ll find further details of SP3, together with the download links here.

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