My brother is a secondary school teacher. He is going to buy an iMac and wants to install MS Office on it (I know iWork and Open Office alternatives are available and credible options but he insists he wants MS Office, not alternatives).

His current version of Office includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Publisher and he wants the same again.

To do that on a non-subscription basis seems to be “Office Professional” for £389 big money but also seemingly not available for Mac. The only other option seems to be on a subscription basis “Office 365 Personal” at £59. Clearly a lot cheaper but am I right in thinking it will literally stop working somehow after a year?

I got office for about £15 through my work Home User Programme some years ago, is that available to teachers or does it depend on which school you teach at?

Any suggestions appreciated.

I thought teachers and other education professionals got a very good, special price from MicroSoft?

I bought some software for my daughter at software for students website, that was cheaper. is there a similar site for teachers or maybe they offer it cheaper on that site

Ah, further to that I have just spotted that publisher is not actually available on the Mac. Hmm. May be a stumbling point.

Software4students.co.uk – need an academia email address to qualify, so also applicable to teachers.

Any family members of school children are also eligible – no academic e-mail address required (though I could easily enough get myself one with a sch.uk suffix if I wanted – nominally I already have one as admin)

Good suggestion but that doesn’t actually seem that much cheaper, the only version available for Mac from there is the ‘Home and Student’ version which is £99 as opposed to £109 direct from MS, so cheaper but not by all that much.

http://www.software4students.co.uk/products/microsoft-office-home-and-student-2013-2014

They are out of stock of the 2011 version and the University version specifically says university and FE only, appears to require some sort of student card code,