Since Excel and Word get a lot of use among fastpitch afficionados, we thought we’d share this one with you.

Microsoft’s software can be a little pricey, but this looks to be their best deal in a long while: Office 2007 for Students for $60. You have to be an eligible college student to get this price (and show proof of enrollment and all that), but it’s a great deal if you qualify. The new version is, IMHO, a big improvement over the old, especially Word.

From Wired Magazine:

Students: Grab Office Ultimate 2007 For $60
By Scott Gilbertson

msoffice.jpgMicrosoft is running a new student promotion, dubbed The Ultimate Steal, which allows eligible college students to purchase Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 at the discounted price of $60. Office Ultimate includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, InfoPath, Groove, OneNote, Outlook and Publisher. Office Ultimate 2007 carries a list price of $680, though a quick Google search turned up offers as low as $240.

The offer comes with a 30 day free trial (which is also available to non-students via the Office website) and the deal expires April 30 2008. The offer is available to students in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Microsoft recently ran a similar promotion (now expired) in Australia, and, judging by the way that one worked, the new deals will likely be limited to select schools and you’ll need access to your university .edu e-mail account.

If you’d like to know what all is new in Office 2007, have a look at Wired’s review from earlier this year.

Microsoft’s offer may seem a little extreme, selling Office Ultimate at over 90% off, but given the amount of piracy among college students, this is probably a good move for the company. At least they’ll potentially generate some revenue.

Update: I received a few emails about the free, OpenOffice.org MS-look-a-like software, including this one from Lukas Kamps, our resident computer whiz (Lukas is the one that tweaked our forum to match the design of the rest of the site):

I just saw the post on MS Office for students. I think you should mention that OpenOffice is also available to users at a great price! It is free and open source. There are many reviews on the web stating OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org) is very comparable to MS Office, and even better in some aspects. In fact, with the new design of Office 2007 many people are finding it difficult to use and are switching to OpenOffice!

Cheers,

Lukas Kamps
Ageus Solutions Inc
http://www.ageussolutions.com

And here is the last paragraph from the Wired article that got left out of the earlier post:

While Office Ultimate 2007 for $60 is a pretty good deal, we can’t help but think that OpenOffice, which is an even better deal at $0, would probably fill the needs of most students. OpenOffice can even handle documents saved in Office 2007’s OOXML format, so you shouldn’t have any trouble collaborating with your classmates.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 9:05 am and is filed under Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.