Got the daughter a laptop for Christmas to help with homework etc.
Looking around for a copy of Office 07 and trying to find a decent price, (microsofts own website offered me it for the less than knockdown price of £77)
found a website called software4students and I can get a copy for £39 delivered to the door.
I know you can get 'dodgy' copies I may even has seen one near my desktop at home (or not :wink:) but wanted to keep the daughters laptop all above board kinda thing.
Is that a good price or is there anything better out there?

Find out what you can about "The Ultimate Steal", or get her to ask the IT bods at her uni. It was around in 2007/2008 when I was at uni, and was a scheme run by Microsoft wherein students could download MS Office 2007 Ultimate (the £400 full monty!) for £49.

OpenOffice should suffice for homework purposes…

Whilst not the Ultimate version, you can get Student and Teacher for £60, here:

Well I'm not sure you'll get much better than £39 but Amazon are doing it for £60 for a three license copy if legitimacy is an issue.

The software4students looks okay to me and assuming your daughter is at school, why else would you want to buy her it, then she is eligible.

FWIW I got a full enterprise copy of MS office for the princely sum of about £20 through the company I used to work for and it's on that site for £53.

OpenOffice should suffice for homework purposes…

It should. But from experience, despite all the claims of .doc, .docx etc, etc and compatibility, it's better to have as much "overlap" with the college/university-issue software as you can. That way, should you find yourself 1hr before the deadline with a dead computer or without a printer (been there, several times!), you can switch from your computer to the college/uni ones without any faffing around…

softwareforstudents is ok – proper licensed copies you just have to sign up yr kids and are limited in number of copies you can buy

ref open office etc thats fine i tried that with my daughter but it wasn't the same as she used at school so rather than use her laptop she hogged the family pc – i had expected her to be more willing to try something slightly different but there you go

Jimbo – in my experience the most likely cause of such panic inducing compatibility issues would be if you saved a .docx from your new version of Word at home and found the college/school computers had an old version of Word that only understands .doc…

software4students is pukka

OpenOffice is pants compared to Office 2007. Really, it is. I tried using it for quite a while but when I trialed 2007 I thought it was well worth the £80 I paid.

thanks all, there is a 2 month free trial available through acer who make the laptop, but not sure if should wait in case the price goes up cos the offer is liited.

JIMBO – check with IT bods at Uni LOL! she's 12 mate don't try to age me, I'm doing my best to cling onto my 30's!

You could always hunt out the legitimate developers copy or whatever it is. Works out free then!

'kniell, a laptop at that age, for homework! What's the world coming to?

I can vouch for Software4students – cosher.
I too didn't believe it so emailed Microsoft uk and they told me they were totally legit.
So….have bought 2 lots of 07 ultimate for both daughters. Simply open/make an account, then you register your kid through county/school/name, pays yer money and it pops through the door!
Told next door neighbour and she's done it for hers too.
The amazon deal can't touch even the basic deal from Software 4 students, the Amazon one used to be excel/word/powerpoint but no proper email client, whereas S4S has Outlook included as basic email.
Legit stuff, bargain basement price.
Some of the others up there ( Ultimate steal ) require a Uni address i.e XXX @ (uni name).ac.uk to be able to buy.

my tuppence
Q

So….have bought 2 lots of 07 ultimate for both daughters. Simply open/make an account, then you register your kid through county/school/name, pays yer money and it pops through the door!

Now I'm confused. I thought the 60 squids amazon link allowed you to install on three computers rather than having to buy more copies of the cheaper product – or did I miss something?

I've not checked lately but i though Microsoft had woken up and now offered 'home user' deals on Office which were about the student price anyway. (you can usually order student software from DAbs and others as well – there used to be absolutely no checks done).

I'd not bother with the 'full' version – word/excel/powerpoint is all most people need. There are better, simpler, email clients than Outlook – Thunderbird amongst others.

Another vote for software4students. Got a full version of Office Enterprise 07 for about £35 for my 7 year old 😀

Wanted the full version to get Outlook as Office Student Ed comes with Onenote instead of Outlook iirc. Thunderbird is okay for emails but I wanted the integrated calendar which Outlook offers

anyone else feel like they just moved everything in office 07 for the sake of making it different, I swear I spend half my time using it just looking for things that aren't where they've been for the last X number of years. 👿

I think the new layout is much better actually…

openoffice is **** , wrote my thesis in it – as a standalone program its great – when i went to print it using office 97 (and it was saved as a .doc file) the formatting was all to pot despite being done to the letter in open office and my titles etc were all guff

office 07 takes a bit of getting used to compared to 2003 but its much more intuitive than 03 – you just have to get your head doing things the way they should be done rather than the way 03 wanted to make you do it !

leffeboy:
sorry to confuse.
The s4s version allows it to be on a laptop and a pc, so daughter1 put it on my pc and her laptop. Daughter 2 has put her version on my wife's new laptop, hence the second coppy in n0.2's name.
Take a careful look at what Amazon sell and what s4s sells. The amazon one is *not* a full office version. As said, it only has 3 programmes on it ( word, excel and powerpoint ) and I can't remember what it uses if anything for email. S4S is the real deal, and if you go for Ultimate, it has 9(?) programmes with it – one note,outlook, access, groove, info path, publisher, excel, word,powerpoint….most of which i haven't a clue about, but they are there should my daughter need them.
Carefully compare amazon and s4s, and if you only want the basic office, then s4s does it for 2 computers for £39 last time I looked.
cheers
Q

Office home version allows three installs, which may be useful for you. No Publisher tho, and Publisher would be pretty useful in school I imagine.

I ordered the disk from Software 4 students at around 9.30 on Friday night, It was here today when I got back in from work, not bad at all, £40.

I thinik it's software for students that has been recommended to me and other family members by a lecturer in the family. You can also get it discounted if you're over 65 I think. It's a good pricefor a legal copy