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Microsoft on Tuesday released the first service pack for Office 2007, focusing on improvements to stability and performance instead of new features.

“People were generally happy with the tools we’ve offered in [Office] 2007,” Reed Shaffner, product manager for Microsoft Office, said in an interview. “You’re not going to hear about a ton of new features.” Office 2007 has seen strong sales that Microsoft officials have credited with significantly bolstering the company’s financial earnings.

The world’s largest software maker said Office 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) will crash less, is easier to use and is more secure than the original program that was released to consumers in January.

Microsoft had said it planned to release Office 2007 SP1 in early 2008, but the company finished updating the software sooner than it expected.

Microsoft explained that using data from the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system, the developers fixed, at minimum, the five software bugs that most frequently caused each application in the 2007 Office system to crash. The 2007 Office system SP1 also improves the stability of server components in the 2007 Office system and compatibility with Windows Server 2008.

The 2007 Office system SP1 improves performance in applications that are pervasive in modern offices, most notably: Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007, and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, Microsoft claims.