Australian Students Can Get Office at 95% Off Retail

tora201 writes "Microsoft Australia is offering university students in that country Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition for just $75 Australian dollars, a 95% discount off the usual retail price. Alternatively students can buy a one year renewable license at just $25, or download a trial version that can be later activated. Eligibility is determined through a valid Australian university e-mail address with payment made via credit card."

Comments

Dupe!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Dupe - and the original story was much funnier - it covered MS's promotional site being flagged as a phishing site by MS's own IE7.

Re:Dupe!

[Nimloth]

Eligibility is determined through a valid Australian university e-mail address with payment made via credit card

On a totally unrelated matter, does anyone here have any tips on spoofing email addresses?

But the sad thing is...

[Max Romantschuk]

Dupe or not, the sad thing is there are lots of students clueless enough to think that they need MS Office when 99% of them can do all they need with OpenOffice.org.

Re:But the sad thing is...

[W2k]

But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice. Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience. In this sense, the students being allowed to buy Office 2007 for cheap is a Good Thing for them.

Now, perhaps most companies running Office 2003/2007 could also have managed with OpenOffice, but that argument is not going to help a job-seeking student...

Re:But the sad thing is...

[Max Romantschuk]

But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice. Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience.

The vast majority of Office users never really use more than a very limited subset of the available features. A univeristy level student should be able to pick those up in a span of a few days, if familiar with Office applications in general.

If you're aiming for a job which requires serious Office involvement it's a good thing to learn MS Office. But for writing papers, etc. buying it makes little sense. Spend a few hours every now and then in the uni computer lab and practice with MS Office instead.

Re:But the sad thing is...

[pandrijeczko]

It could be argued that if your CV (or resume) is that difficult to fill with interesting information about yourself that you have to mention "MS Office experience", then you probably need to go and spend some time getting some better skills.

I accept that more complex skills in MS Office like Excel programming, data merges, etc. are probably in demand by many employers - but for someone who just creates simple documents in MS Office, OpenOffice would probably take no more than a couple of hours to adjust to.

Re:But the sad thing is...

[W2k]

Lots of people have responded to my post same as you, "if you have to mention Office experience to fill your CV you suck", or "if your employer thinks you need retraining to switch Office versions they're daft", etc. That's beside the point. The point is that HR people will use "office 2007" as a search term when looking through the stack of digitized CV's they got in response for their latest job offering. HR people really are that clueless. And if you don't want to lie on your CV, it will serve you to be able to put "Office 2007" in there.

Remember that I am talking about jobs that a student, in his last couple of years or just post graduation, might consider. NOT the most technically advanced positions, more like entry-level. In those, I've found, they only care about past positions.

Re:But the sad thing is...

[GreatDrok]

A few years back I was between proper jobs and had to do some temping work. The temping agency asked if I could use Office. I didn't know as I had only used OpenOffice as I had been a Linux user since 1994 and before that I was on SunOS. Anyway, I knew OpenOffice pretty well at the time so I figured it would be interesting to see how well I did in their Office proficiency test. They set it up for Office XP and away I went. The funny thing was that they tested my ability to find things in the menu within a couple of tries and didn't let me use keyboard shortcuts. Despite this, the interface of Word was so similar to what I knew from OpenOffice 1.x that I was able to pass the test easily with what they said was a very high score. Some of the really specific functions in Office versus OpenOffice differ in their placement or what they are called but most are close enough that a user of one will be perfectly able to use the other. This is why schools should encourage the use of OpenOffice. This massive discount is a cyncical attempt by MS to get students so used to Office that they won't consider anything else.

On a similar note, I recently bought my Mum a MacBook and just gave it to her. She has never used anything other than Windows but even without training she was able to find her way around but recently she was struggling to get Word to format some pictures properly on the page so I suggested she use the trial copy of Pages. She was amazingly difficult to convince to try and use anything other than Office, even though she happily used OpenOffice on her Windows box but eventually she tried it and a few minutes in she was suddenly very enthusiastic about it. In the end, what MS wants to do is get people scared of trying anything else. Ever. Teaching people only to use Windows and MS applications from an early age is key to this strategy and it is a cycle that needs to be broken if we are ever to have people who can really function in the face of alternative software. MS has been so successful that people often struggle when moving from one Windows machine to another simply because an icon is in a different place. That just sucks.

Re:But the sad thing is...

[a.ameri]

Am I the only one around here who actually likes the ribbon interface?

First of all, I am a student in Australia, and right now I am downloading Office 2007 Ultimate after shelving out $75 of my hard earned cash. This I think, is the first time I am directly paying for software in my life, and I guess it's mainly because of how impressed I have become of Office 2007's interface. I had been using a pirated copy of Enterprise Edition for the past couple of weeks, but after seeing this offer, I realised that having a legitimate copy which can easily be validated and updated is worth $75.

I have used every version of Office since Office 97, and I have also used every version of OOo since it was Staroffice 5.x. Even after all these years, I always found myself looking for a specific option, and jumping from menu to the other menu. Let's face it, there is absolutely no logic why many of these items are where they are. It's just that we have become so accustomed with the interface that we have memorised where they are, and hence are able to use the product. Have you ever looked at a person who has never used any office product, trying to make sense out of Office? I have (my mother), and let me tell you that it is hugely frustrating, to say the least.

Ribbons just make the whole problem disappear. The whole functionality is now right in your face, and they have designed it in a way which takes less screen real space than all those menus and toolbars did. The whole interface is now more intuitive, and everything seems in its place. Now, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy here, but realistically, ribbons are a UI improvement over menus and toolbars. It took me perhaps 2-3 days to get accustomed to it, but after that I never looked back.

I agree that for 90% of the time, OOo is fine feature-wise, and does the job. However in the Real World (TM), people ask that you hand in your CV in "word format", and they don't even accept PDFs (don't ask me why). I am afraid I simply can't trust OOo's "save as MS Word" feature, for files which are critical to me. Not to mention that there are those of us who really need the extra functionality MS Office provides. It's not just Office's own functionality either, there are various 3rd party products that only integrate with MS Office, e.g., here in the University of Melbourne, we use a program called End Note X to manage our bibliographies and references when writing articles. Guess what word processing program it integrated with? (hint: not OOo). Now I myself probably won't trust Word (or any WYSIWYG program for that matter) for writing 100+ pages (I used LaTex for writing my Master's thesis), but LaTex is simply not an option for 99% of the population who have been brought up in a WYSIWYG world.

To say that all those paying for MS Office are ignorants who are not aware of alternatives is stupid. Ribbon is a very fine UI evolution, and I strongly suspect that in a couple of years time, all document generating programs will use the same interface. Not withstanding the technical superiority of MS Office over all other office suits at this time, it should also be noted that many of us have to use Office to ensure document compatibility with everyone else, as well as compatibility with a large number of 3rd party products which we rely on for our day to day life.

Now, I should probably get back to my thesis again, in LaTex...

$1500 ?

[Zork the Almighty]

95% off ? Does Microsoft actually sell any single license for Office to anyone at ~$1500 US ?

If the ultimate edition...

[dragonquest]

If the Ultimate Edition is being given away so cheap to students, why the hell did they ever came up with the Student Edition minus the frills? Which notably, costs more than the discounted Ultimate Edition for students.

Ethics

[Anonymous Coward]

M$FT: The same ethics as a heroine dealer at a school yard: just get them hooked young and let them suffer later!

Re:Ethics

[Skrynesaver]

The same ethics as a heroine dealer at a school yard:

Psst wanna buy a bit of Jane Eyre, into something a bit harder, I've got Ripley here, try her and tell me what you think

Limited installations

[om3ga]

I thought I'd point out a few things that were mentioned on the article from a few days ago:

- This ultimate edition thats available through this offer is limited to installation on one PC, vs installation on three PCs available to those who buy the student edition (around $249AU)
- You don't get the CDs with the offer, but can download it, or get a disc from a participating university (I didn't check if it was just a burnt copy or a nicely labeled pressed disc). I'd pay $75 if OpenOffice came in such a fancy box!

I was one button away from purchasing it, until I realized how unnecessary it is for me. I use OpenOffice for my university studies, it opens every word document and PowerPoint presentation thats given to us from the Lecturers. I'm not sure how it is for other things. But for those of you who think this is a good deal, please consider, or atleast try OpenOffice first!

Microsoft Office 2007 Ultimate Edition

[BillGatesLoveChild]

If it is "Ultimate" does that mean there will be no further releases?