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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."
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.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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...
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
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.
.: Max Romantschuk
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.
"Never try to tell everything you know. It may take too short a time."
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
"Linux is for noobs"-The new MS fud strategy
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...
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