Office:Mac 2008 SP2 available today

Today, we have released Office:Mac 2008 SP2. What's in it for you?

PowerPoint: In a lot of ways, this is the star of SP2 for me. (Of course, it helps that I'm on the PowerPoint team. :) In SP2, we have added two highly-requested features: the ability to create custom path animations and the ability to define your own custom default theme. It also brings a feature that I advocated for: double-click anywhere on the slide, and you get a text box to type in.  

Word: Look for improved launch times here. There's also performance improvements throughout, with a special eye towards improving scrolling speeds. You're most likely to notice this when you're working in a big document in Word. In Outline View, scrolling is up to 10 times faster.

Excel: Excel has a bunch of performance improvements, with lots of them in the area of calculation performance. If you're a heavy-duty Excel user who does lots of in-depth stuff in your spreadsheets, this update is for you.

Entourage: Entourage now supports proxy auto-config (.pac) fies. We've also updated our account set-up code for MobileMe and to handle Hotmail's change to POP support.

Document Connection for Mac: That's the other star of this release for me, also possibly because I worked on it. :) As we announced back at Macworld Expo, this is a standalone app that better enables Mac users to work with documents stored in SharePoint and Office Live Workspaces.

Open XML File Format Converter: This has some improvements to its support of the XML file formats (.docx, .pptx, .xlsx, etc). For more information on the release, you can read the Knowledge Base article.

In addition to this release, the Office Live Workspace team has done some improvements to their Mac support. They've expanded their Mac browser support to include Safari and Firefox (all the way back to 2.0, which means that users still on Jaguar can use it!).

The update is live now. You can either download it from Mactopia here, or you can fire up Microsoft AutoUpdate by opening up any Office app, going to the Help menu, and selecting "Check for Updates".

Additional details are available in the official Mac Mojo blog post Announcing Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2, as well as in the Knowledge Base article. There's lots to be found in SP2, and the KB article is the best place to get it.

Got questions? Use the comments thread on this post, or you can follow me on twitter here.


Edited at noon PDT to add in the Entourage changes (and I'm embarrassed that I forgot that!) and a link to the KB article.