I don’t know if anyone’s interested but this popped up in one of the OU open conferences recently and I thought I’d post it here just in case anyone would like to take advantage of the offer. It expires in seven days time so you need to take advantage pretty quickly to avoid missing out.
http://www.theultimatesteal.co.uk/
Basically, Microsoft is offering its Office 2007 Ultimate suite for less than £40 to UK registered students. The only catch is that you have to have a university email address:
You must hold a valid email address at a UK, Jersey, Guernsey or Isle of Man educational institution, ending in either ‘.ac.uk’, ‘ac.im’, ‘ac.gg’ or ‘ac.je’.
I’ve always resisted the MS Office suite because it’s expensive and bloated, but even I couldn’t resist this offer (it has Publisher 2007 and I’m still using Publisher 98!). It also has OneNote which is a good tool for students.
Anyway, if you want to take advantage of the offer you need to give them your OU address to verify. They then send an email with a special link to your OU mailbox, you click on the link and purchase the software. You can get it as a download (about 500Mb+ but it was a VERY fast connection on my broadband) and also buy a backup DVD for about £9.00 if you want. You can buy the download for £38.95 or buy a year’s license for £12.95.
Note that an OU student email address has this format:
lam238@student.open.ac.uk
I haven’t installed it yet (I’ll probably try it on my laptop first) but I doubt very much if I’d pay Microsoft’s £599 published price for it!
