I bought an Office 365 Home Premium code off ebay, which includes Publisher. £55 for 12 months for 5 devices (PC's/ipads) plus each user gets 1TB one drive storage. Plus I think you get Skype call credit.

I know you don't want to rent it, £11/device/year for "proper" Office is not bad.

If memory serves me right it was a couple of hundred pounds to buy outright for one machine.

Are you a student or an educational pro? MS give great discounts to those in education. Depending on their VL agreements, some unis can hand out office to students foc.

There was a thread a few days ago might be worth a read. IIRC the general consensus was to go for libre office or open office unless you have a good reason to give Microsoft some money.

£79.99 a year for Office 365 Household - 5 users.

I didn't get the subscription idea until I noticed that each user gets 1Tb of OneDrive space. Not many online storage options that cheap.

There's another thread suggesting LibreOffice or OpenOffice as alternative to MS Office, both free. An alternative to Publisher would be Serif PagePlus, about £10 for old versions.

P-jay

Why can't you transfer the licence you own to a new machine? I accept that it would be reasonable to do an uninstall on the old machine to verify you only had 1 copy working, but to say you can't transfer a licence you own seems wrong

Not necessarily helping the OP's quest for a helpful answer but those considering Office 365 should know that Microsoft just announced that it now comes with 'unlimited' OneDrive storage.!!! I didn't read closely enough to get the precise definition of unlimited but on the face of it, if you have a lot of data that you want to store/backup on a cloud service then this seems like a good deal with a copy of Office essentially thrown in for free..!

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Microsoft or any of it's subsidiaries.. 😆

Thanks for the input folks. I suppose I'm an old fashioned sort of person, I like physical things- I still buy CDs instead of downloads if you see what I mean.

Anyway, here is the ebay offering.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Microsoft-Office-Professional-Plus-2010-3PC-3-USERS-FULL-VERSION-/321564983529?pt=UK_Computing_Software_Software_SR&hash=item4adec440e9

Apparently Office 365 have just made their OneDrive unlimited....

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/27/7078397/microsoft-unlimited-onedrive-storage-office-365

NB I have a legit copt of MS Office 2010 Professional (3 license) with only one used i.e. 2 still free, which I'd sell for say £80.

This one?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Microsoft-Office-2010-Professional-Plus-32-Bit-64-Bit-Brand-New-3-PC-License-/251695352682?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item3a9a364b6a
Top of the list that came up when you posted the link, it's download only and you get mailed the key.

I was skeptical about the office 365 and leasing/renting but as the current/older versions are locked to the machine (you can't reactivate the code once you hit the number in the package) it made a lot less sense.

One more thing to consider with Office 365. If Office 2015 is released in January (my subscription ends in May) I automatically get the upgrade, so you are always on the latest version. Not always a good thing, but useful if MS change the file format and render Office 2010 incompatible.

I've used Software for Students previously but now I've just looked and they're mostly subscription - which IMO will cost a serious amount of money over time.

If you work for a big company they may have a corporate licence that allows the sale of Office to staff for pennies. I got the most recent Office for Mac with all the gubbins for £9 this way.

I got the most recent Office for Mac with all the gubbins for £9 this way.

Our was just free, there's a tar ball on a server we can just install...

Quick question, how well do libre office and open office handle the X format MS files? Specifically excel, in the past I believe they (libre/open) reformat the files, and then MS office doesn't deal well with the saved/edited files.

If you work for a big company they may have a corporate licence that allows the sale of Office to staff for pennies. I

For googling purposes, it's called the "Home Use Program."

Open office / libre don't support VBA, so Macros etc won't work either.

In the end I decided to join the 21st century and downloaded 365. Now the whole family are smiling although I still want a nice CD to put in a rack.

Hi, don't buy a Professional Plus version, they are worthless volume keys you can get for nothing