Office On Demand

I saw an advertisement from Microsoft for Office 365. Apparently students could get the software by paying $80 for four years. What? That must be a mistake. The old Office education edition used to cost eith $99 or $150. What is up? I went to a Microsoft site. After first I was pissed off because the site kept redirecting me to some spiel from Microsoft on signing schols up for Office 365.

I almost gave up. But I wanted to know about this $80 for four years deal. Sure enough, after clicking around, I found the page for Office 365 University. You do indeed pay $80 for a four year subscription. This allows you to get the latest version of MS Office. Currently that would be MS OFfice 2013 for PCs.

This is not a stripped down vesion of Office either, You get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access. This is the whole kitchen of Office products. Normally this would cost you $100 per year for a subscription. Instead students get it for $80 over four years. That's not $80 per year. That is $80 total for the whole four years.

I guess Microsoft is really pushing hard for this software subscription service. Feels like a great deal compared to the shrink wrapped versions of Office. I am going to have to give this a try.