If you’re using Microsoft Office 2007 on a personal computer, you’ll want to download a copy of the company’s first service pack, which came out a week ago. To find it, go to www.microsoft.com/office and look for the service pack headline link. (If your machine is a business PC, wait until your corporate IT department has issued the A-OK on installation.)

The service pack is free and contains 400 bug fixes, security fixes, stability improvements and performance enhancements. Some of the new stuff has been issued as separate updates, but this 219-megabyte download consolidates those and adds more. You’ll find fixes for Access, Excel, InfoPath, the overall Office application, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project and Project Server, Publisher, SharePoint Designer, Visio and Word.

Among the interesting problems the service pack addresses:

— When you try to use Word 2007 to open a document that uses a ZIP format, Word 2007 does not consider the file format converter for the ZIP format. When this problem occurs, the File Conversion dialog box does not appear. Instead, you receive an error message that resembles the following: The Office Open XML file cannot be opened because there a problems with the contents.

— You open a PowerPoint Show (.pps) file in full-screen view two times. Then, you close the file. In this situation, PowerPoint 2007 stops responding.

— A user’s computer may hang if the user runs Outlook 2007 on Windows Vista and connects over a slow connection.

— When you try to use arrow keys to move the cursor in a text box in Excel 2007, the cursor moves in the opposite direction.

As somebody who has difficulty with the smallest of binary problems (one that comes to mind: loading toilet paper in the right direction), I always marvel at the magic performed by developers — and the rich variety of problems they introduce into software with their coding skills.

Posted on December 22nd, 2007 by dian