Office 2010 Service Pack 1 - 5 Common questions regarding the Service Pack

With Office 2010 Service Pack 1 having now been out for one week, we wanted to cover some of the most common questions we’ve been getting. Here is a compiled list of the 5 most common questions.

  1. Will installing Office 2010 Service Pack 1 require a reboot?
  2. Common Problem: “The installation of this package failed”
  3. How do I confirm that I have Office 2010 Service Pack 1 installed?
  4. Can I uninstall Office Service Pack 1?
  5. If I uninstall the Service Pack that contains the security fixes, am I vulnerable?

1. Will installing Office 2010 Service Pack 1 require a reboot?

In the majorityinstalls for Client and Server, Office 2010 SP1 may require a reboot. To decrease the likelihood of the reboot, it is advised to close down all open Office applications prior to install.

2. Common Problem: “The installation of this package failed” due to not enough disk space

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This is the generic error dialog that appears when an unknown error occurs during installation. The majority of these failures are related to not having enough space on the system drive. The download size for Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 1 x86 is 361 MB, however with extraction (%temp%) and windows installer caching (%windir%), the amount of disk space required for installation is around 1.3 GB.

If freeing up disk space does not solve the issue, please read the following KB article KB954713.

3. How do I confirm that I have Office 2010 Service Pack 1 installed?

There are several ways to learn whether or not you have Office SP1.

The first is checking the updates through Add/Remove programs. This can be done by opening the Start Menu, go to the Control Panel, and then click on Programs [and Features]. From there, click on View installed updates which will display entries for installed SP1 update.

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Another way to see if Service Pack 1 is installed is to view the Help documentation in any of the individual applications. To do this, click the File tab in the top left, and then find and click “Help” in the left menu. From the “Help” page, you will see the following dialog on the right side of the page.

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Click on the Additional Version and Copyright link to bring up the following dialog which will show the version along with the Service Pack baseline.

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The best way to learn if you’re completely up to date with all of Office SP1 is to scan MU. If this is not an option, you can get a comprehensive list of all Office Products are installed and what baseline they are at by using the ROIScan tool located here on TechNet.

4. Can I uninstall Office Service Pack 1?

Note: Server packages are NOT uninstallable for Office 2010 Service Pack 1

Yes, with Office 2010 you have the ability to uninstall the service pack on your client machines. For this service pack, we have added the ability to uninstall SP1 updates through Add/Remove Programs. In the near future we will also be releasing a tool similiar to Oarpman (used for 2007 Sp2) which allows you to streamline the removal of the service pack from your client machines.

NOTE: Uninstalling the service pack will remove the SP from any product that has the service pack install (e.g. if you have Office and Project Sp1 installed on the same machine by removing Office Sp1 you will also remove the SP for Project). To use this feature, open the Start Menu, go to the Control Panel, and then click on Programs [and Features]. From there, click on View installed updates which will display entries for each installed SP1 update. You can now select any client update and click “Uninstall” in the menu:

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You will then see the following two dialogs:

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After completing uninstall, you will likely be prompted to restart to complete the action.

5. If I uninstall the Service Pack that contains the security fixes, am I vulnerable?

After you uninstall the service pack it is recommended to go to Microsoft Update to scan for the latest security updates. After doing so you will be up to date with all Microsoft Office security updates that have been released. Per Microsoft policy we will support both the service pack and the original release for a 12 month period.