[ms office - 2003] Is it worth installing the Service Packs for MS Office 2003

[Richard_Finnigan]

Hi

 

I develop MS Office applications using VBA Access, Excel and Word for my school and I recently hit an awkward error message that I had to do a lot work on to resolve. One piece of advice that I came across was to ensure that the latest Service Packs had been installed so that I am not contending with problems that have already been resolved. Access is on Service Pack 1 and Excel and Word are on Service Pack 2.

 

I would like to get all three applications on Service Pack 3 but I have been told that the Service Packs are not very useful and it looks like that job wont get done.

 

So how many of you out there have installed all of the MSO Service Packs up to 3 on your school's machines and do you think its worth it ?

 

Richard Finnigan

St John's School

Northwood

[ChrisH]

It's always worth it to make sure all the security updates are on. Your users will be clicking on all sorts of files on the Internet which will just open in IE. Who knows what payload some may have exploiting an unpatched machine.

I have also found office to be a lot more stable with all the updates on. Especially Access.

 

I generally update the administrative install and redeploy or make sure the patches are authorised in WSUS.

[Richard_Finnigan]

Yeh Access is such a complex application that its particularly important to keep it bang up to date, also for me its the application that I use to control Excel and Word, everthing I do hinges around it.

[kmount]

Whoever told you that they weren't important is misguided.

 

We have SP3 across out entire site with no problems at all, if anything, within Access things have improved on the Reporting side which used to hang for unknown reasons.

[SYNACK]

I pushed out SP3 to all clients when it was made avalible, just updated the administrative install point and set it to redeploy. Using this install process means that the amount of time and effort required are trivial.

 

It is important for both security and usability to have the SPs installed as there are a vast amount of bug fixes included.

[BaccyNet]

All Office updates rolled out here too. I do a fair bit of programming myself and theres nothing more annoying than having to write chunks of code to cover for the fact someone cant be bothered to keep office/windows up to date!

 

Also I'm pretty sure our county IT peeps wouldnt be too happy if we werent running all latest updates/service packs for Microsoft stuff.